Purpose: The
quotes themselves are primarily intended to show the confusion that exists
even within the scientific community concerning the theory of evolution.
There does seem to be a general agreement that evolution "happened"
and is "happening", but no one seems to have a very clear idea as to
exactly how evolution works. While reading these quotes, I think that many
will get a sense that even those who are in the know and who ardently believe
that evolution happens are still unclear about exactly how it happens.
This is interesting because the general public has been led to believe that
the very process of evolution is clearly understood by the scientific
community. The truth is that scientists have very few solid examples of
evolution in action where new functions are actually produced. The few
examples that they do have seem to show some interesting limits in
evolutionary potential. Often such observations are bent, molded or
exaggerated to fit some a priori assumptions that do not truly match the
observations as well as might be hoped. Surprisingly, even the interpretations
of scientists are often colored by philosophy and personal bias. Yes,
even among scientists there are those who freely confess that they have a need
to believe in evolution that goes beyond any demonstration of fact or the
scientific method. This is not too surprising since humans are quite
prone to bias. And yet, many scientists claim to rise above such biases.
You be the judge. However, in reading these quotes remember that quotes can be
taken out of context quite easily and may not clearly represent the actual
views of the listed author. I have reviewed the original material for
many, but not all or even most, of these quotes. I am relying on the
credibility of secondary sources for the most part until I am able to review
each one of them personally. Even then, and even with the best of intentions
to accurately present the author's views, errors or misrepresentations may
occur. Since many of my secondary sources have a bias toward design theory and
creationism, as well as evolutionism, one should keep this in mind as these
quotes are read. The ideas presented might be interesting, but should only be
used as occasion for further review. If any errors or misrepresentations
are found please inform me atSeanpit1@juno.com.

"Darwin's
book, On the Origin of Species, was published in 1859. It is perhaps the most
influential book that has ever been published, because it was read by scientist
and non- scientist alike, and it aroused violent controversy. Religious people
disliked it because it appeared to dispense with God; scientists liked it
because it seemed to solve the most important problem in the universe-the
existence of living matter. In fact, evolution became in a sense a scientific
religion; almost all scientists have accepted it and many are prepared to 'bend'
their observations to fit in with it.

"In
fact the a priori reasoning is so entirely satisfactory to me that if the facts
won't fit in, why so much the worse for the facts is my feeling."

Erasmus
Darwin, in a letter to his brother Charles, after reading his new book,
"The Origin of Species," in Darwin, F., ed., "The Life of Charles
Darwin," [1902], Senate: London, 1995, reprint, p215.

"Our
willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key
to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural.
We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its
constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises
of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for
unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a
commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of
science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal
world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to
material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts
that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter
how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for
we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."

Lewontin,
Richard C. [Professor of Zoology and Biology, Harvard University],
"Billions and Billions of Demons", Review of "The Demon-Haunted
World: Science as a Candle in the Dark," by Carl Sagan, New York Review,
January 9, 1997. (Emphasis in original)

"Another
reason that scientists are so prone to throw the baby out with the bath water is
that science itself, as I have suggested, is a religion. The neophyte scientist,
recently come or converted to the world view of science, can be every bit as
fanatical as a Christian crusader or a soldier of Allah. This is particularly
the case when we have come to science from a culture and home in which belief in
God is firmly associated with ignorance, superstition, rigidity and hypocrisy.
Then we have emotional as well as intellectual motives to smash the idols of
primitive faith. A mark of maturity in scientists, however, is their awareness
that science may be as subject to dogmatism as any other religion."

"Spencer's
belief in the universality of natural causation was, together with his
laissez-faire political creed, the bedrock of his thinking. It was this belief,
more than anything else, that led him to reject Christianity, long before the
great conflict of the eighteen-sixties Moreover, it was his belief in natural
causation that led him to embrace the theory of evolution, not vice versa. ...
His faith was so strong that it did not wait on scientific proof. Spencer became
an ardent evolutionist at a time when a cautious scientist would have been
justified at least in suspending judgement. ... for him the belief in natural
causation was primary, the theory of evolution derivative."

Burrow,
John W. [Professor of Intellectual History, University of Sussex, UK],
"Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory," [1966],
Cambridge University Press: London, 1968, reprint, pp.180-181, 205).

"Naturalism
... (in modern metaphysics) the view that everything (objects and events) is a
part of nature, an all-encompassing world of space and time. It implies a
rejection of traditional beliefs in supernatural beings or other entities
supposedly beyond the ken of science. Human beings and their mental powers are
also regarded as normal parts of the natural world describable by science. ...
(in philosophy of mind) physicalism, i.e. materialism in combination with the
view that mentalistic discourse should be reduced, explained or eliminated in
favour of non- mentalistic scientifically acceptable discourse."

"Evolution
is the creation-myth of our age. By telling us our origin it shapes our views of
what we are. It influences not just our thought, but our feelings and actions
too, in a way which goes far beyond its official function as a biological
theory."

"Darwin's
three mistakes were that (1) he dismissed mass extinction as artifacts of an
imperfect geologic record; (2) he assumed that species diversity, like
individuals of a given species, tends to increase exponentially with time; and
(3) he considered biotic interactions the major cause of species extinction.
Those mistakes led to the theory propounded in his book On the Origin
of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races
in the Struggle for Life (Darwin, 1859), which has been adopted by many as
the scientific basis of the social philosophies. The Darwinian theory of
evolution has two themes: common descent and natural selection.
Creationists are barking up the wrong tree when they question common descent,
which is amply documented by scientific evidence. Darwin's mistakes were
in his emphasis on biotic competition in natural selection. We learned
evolution in school, along with aphorisms about the struggle for existence,
natural selection, adaptation, and survival of the fittest. Few of us have
found it necessary to check the scientific basis of the Darwinian theory.
I did not bother to read Origin of the Species until I started to write a
book on the terminal Cretaceous mass extinction. Only then did I realize
how wrong Darwin was on some critical issues and how unfortunate it is that his
mistakes have been misused by ideologists for their propaganda. This essay
is an attempt to renounce social Darwinism... Darwin's theory in biology,
transferred to Germany and nurtured by Ernst Haeckel, inspired an ideology that
led eventually to the rise of the Nazis... We have suffered through two world
wars and are threatened by an Armageddon. We have had enough of the
Darwinian fallacy. It is about time we cry: 'The Emperor Has No
Clothes.'"

"There
was little doubt that the star intellectual turn of last week's British
Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Salford was Dr John
Durant, a youthful lecturer from University College Swansea. Giving the Darwin
lecture to one of the biggest audiences of the week, Durant put forward an
audacious theory-that Darwin's evolutionary explanation of the origins of man
has been transformed into a modern myth, to the detriment of science and social
progress. Durant said that scientists and popularisers have asked too much of
the theory of evolution, demanding that it explain... "Life, the Universe,
and Everything". As a result Darwin's theory has burst at the seams,
leaving a wreckage of distorted and mutilated ideas, and man's understanding of
his society has been hobbled by his inability to escape the conservative myths
he has created. Durant bemoaned the transformation of evolutionary ideas into
"secular or scientific myths". ... they have assumed the social role
of myths-legends about remote ancestors that express and reinforce peoples'
ideas about the society around them. "Like the creation myths which have so
largely replaced, theories of human evolution are basically stories about the
first appearance of man on Earth and the institution of human society,"
said Durant. ... Durant concludes that the secular myths of evolution have had
"a damaging effect on scientific research", leading to
"distortion, to needless controversy, and to the gross misuse of
science".

"How
evolution became a scientific myth," New Scientist, 11 September 1980,
p.765.

__________

Keep
in mind, in reading the following quotes from Grasse, that Grasse was a devoted
evolutionist even though he didn't believe that the mechanism was well
understood. The last quote from Grasse listed here will make this quite
clear.

"Today,
our duty is to destroy the myth of evolution, considered as a simple,
understood, and explained phenomenon which keeps rapidly unfolding before us.
Biologists must be encouraged to think about the weaknesses of the
interpretations and extrapolations that theoreticians put forward or lay down as
established truths. The deceit is sometimes unconscious, but not always, since
some people, owing to their sectarianism, purposely overlook reality and refuse
to acknowledge the inadequacies and the falsity of their beliefs."

Grasse,
Pierre-P. [editor of the 28-volume "Traite de Zoologie", former Chair
of Evolution, Sorbonne University and ex-president of the French Academie des
Sciences], "Evolution of Living Organisms: Evidence for a New Theory of
Transformation", Academic Press: New York NY, 1977, p.8.

"Directed
by all-powerful selection, chance becomes a sort of providence, which, under the
cover of atheism, is not named but which is secretly worshipped...To insist,
even with Olympian assurance, that life appeared quite by chance and evolved in
this fashion, is an unfounded supposition which I believe to be wrong and not in
accordance with the facts."

Grasse,
Pierre-P., [editor of the 28-volume "Traite de Zoologie", former Chair
of Evolution, Sorbonne University and ex-president of the French Academie des
Sciences], "Evolution of Living Organisms Evidence for a New Theory of
Transformation", [1973], Academic Press: New York NY, 1977, p.107

"Zoologists
and botanists are nearly unanimous in considering evolution as a fact and not a
hypothesis. I agree with this position and base it primarily on documents
provided by paleontology, i.e., the history of the living world ... [Also,]
Embryogenesis provides valuable data [concerning evolutionary relationships] ...
Chemistry, through its analytical data, directs biologists and provides guidance
in their search for affinities between groups of animals or plants, and ...
plays an important part in the approach to genuine evolution."

The
following eight quotes are from a recorded discussion which included some
interesting comments from Colin Patterson, late senior paleontologist at the
British Museum of Natural History. The fact that Patterson was not aware
that someone was recording his comments has been used as reason enough to
dismiss what Patterson said since he certainly would not have said things like
he did if he knew he was being recorded. Perhaps this is true, but even
so, his comments are still quite interesting. Others are disturbed by
the "underhanded" way in which the recording was obtained and the
transcript published without Patterson's consent. However, since
Patterson was speaking at a public event, the recording and publication of
such an event is not illegal, underhanded, or immoral. Patterson did
later respond to and clarify his statements. This very interesting
letter is also included below. A copy of the original recording and/or a
transcript of the event can be obtained through: http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/audios/c010.htm

"But it's true that for the last eighteen
months or so, I've been kicking around non-evolutionary or even
anti-evolutionary ideas."

"Now, one of the reasons I started taking
this anti-evolutionary view, well, let's call it non-evolutionary, was last
year I had a sudden realization. For over twenty years I had thought that I
was working on evolution in some way. One morning I woke up, and something
had happened in the night, and it struck me that I had been working on this
stuff for twenty years, and there was not one thing I knew about it. That
was quite a shock, to learn that one can be so misled for so long."

"So either there is something wrong with
me, or there was something wrong with evolutionary theory. Naturally I know
there's nothing wrong with me. So for the last few weeks, I've tried putting
a simple question to various people and groups of people. The question is
this: Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing, any
one thing that you think is true?"

"Well, I'm not interested in the
controversy over teaching in high school, and if any militant creationists
have come here looking for political ammunition, I hope they'll be
disappointed."

"I shall take the text of my sermon from
this book, Gillespie's Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation....He
takes it for granted that a rationalist view of nature has replaced an
irrational one, and of course, I myself took that view, up until about
eighteen months ago. And then I woke up and I realized that all my life I
had been duped into taking evolutionism as revealed truth in some way."

"Well, we're back to the question I've been
putting to people, 'Is there one thing you can tell me about evolution?' And
the absence of an answer seems to suggest that it is true, evolution does
not convey any knowledge, or if so, I haven't yet heard it."

"Now I think many people in this room would
acknowledge that during the last few years, if you had thought about it at
all, you've experienced a shift from evolution as knowledge to evolution as
faith. I know that's true of me, and I think it's true of a good many of you
in here."

"So that's my first theme. That evolution
and creationism seem to be showing remarkable parallels. They are
increasingly hard to tell apart. And the second theme is that evolution not
only conveys no knowledge, but seems somehow to convey anti-knowledge,
apparent knowledge which is actually harmful to systematics."

Dr.
Colin Patterson, Senior Palaeontologist; British Museaum of Natural History,
London, Discussion at the American Museum of Natural History, New York City,
5 November, 1981. Transcripts as well as a copy of the original tape
can be obtained at: http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/audios/c010.htm

The
following quote is part of a personal letter from Colin Patterson to Luther
Sunderland:

"I
fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of
evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I
would certainly have included them. . .I will lay it on the line, There is
not one such fossil for which one might make a watertight argument."

Dr.
Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural
History. The quote is from a personal letter dated 10th April 1979 from Dr.
Patterson to creationist Luther D. Sunderland and is referring to Dr.
Patterson's book "Evolution" (1978, Routledge & Kegan Paul
Ltd.).

It
should be noted that after hearing about the above quotes, Patterson said
that his letter and talk were not meant to cast doubt upon evolution, but
to criticize taking evolution for granted before approaching "systematics."
As can be easily gathered from his book, "Evolution", as well as
other writings, Patterson had no doubt that the theory of evolution was
true as far as an explanation of origins. In fact, Patterson
discusses the above events specifically. A Mr. Theunissen wrote to
Patterson asking him about the above quote and, according to talk.origins http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/patterson.html,
this is what that Patterson said in his reply to Theunissen:

Dear Mr. Theunissen,

Sorry to have taken so long to answer your
letter of July 9th. I was away for a while, and then infernally busy. I
seem fated continually to make a fool of myself with creationists. The
specific quote you mention, from a letter to Sunderland dated 10th April
1979, is accurate as far as it goes. The passage quoted continues
"... a watertight argument. The reason is that statements about
ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record. Is
Archaeopteryx the ancestor of all birds? Perhaps yes, perhaps no: there
is no way of answering the question. It is easy enough to make up
stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why
the stages should be favoured by natural selection. But such stories are
not part of science, for there is no way to put them to the test."

I think the continuation of the passage
shows clearly that your interpretation (at the end of your letter) is
correct, and the creationists' is false.

That brush with Sunderland (I had never
heard of him before) was my first experience of creationists. The famous
"keynote address" at the American Museum of Natural History in
1981 was nothing of the sort. It was a talk to the "Systematics
Discussion Group" in the Museum, an (extremely) informal group. I
had been asked to talk to them on "Evolutionism and
creationism"; fired up by a paper by Ernst Mayr published in
Science just the week before. I gave a fairly rumbustious talk, arguing
that the theory of evolution had done more harm than good to biological
systematics (classification). Unknown to me, there was a creationist in
the audience with a hidden tape recorder. So much the worse for me. But
my talk was addressed to professional systematists, and concerned
systematics, nothing else.

I hope that by now I have learned to be more
circumspect in dealing with creationists, cryptic or overt. But I still
maintain that skepticism is the scientist's duty, however much the
stance may expose us to ridicule.

Yours Sincerely,

[signed]

Colin Patterson

In
the last book that Colin Patterson wrote before he died he said:

[The] "misprints" shared between
species ... are (to me) incontrovertible evidence of common descent.

Evolution, 2nd Edition (1998), Page 122

"The
personal and intellectual drama of Darwin and Dana provides the main subject for
this essay, but I also write to illustrate a broader theme in the lives of
scholars and the nature of science: the integrative power of worldviews (the
positive side), and their hold as conceptual locks upon major innovation (the
negative side)."

"These
so-called M and N notebooks were written in 1838 and 1839, while Darwin was
compiling the transmutation notebooks that formed the basis for his sketches of
1842 and 1844. They ... include many statements showing that he espoused but
feared to expose something he perceived as far more heretical than evolution
itself: philosophical materialism-the postulate that matter is the stuff of all
existence and that all mental and spiritual phenomena are its by-products. ...
The notebooks prove that ... the primary feature distinguishing his theory from
all other evolutionary doctrines was its uncompromising philosophical
materialism. .... In the notebooks Darwin resolutely applied his materialistic
theory of evolution to all phenomena of life, including what he termed "the
citadel itself" - the human mind. And if mind has no real existence beyond
the brain, can God be anything more than an illusion invented by an illusion? In
one of his transmutation notebooks, he wrote: `Love of the deity effect of
organization, oh you materialist!...'"

"By
coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of
natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life
processes superfluous. Together with Marx's materialistic theory of history and
society and Freud's attribution of human behavior to influences over which we
have little control, Darwin's theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the
platform of mechanism and materialism-of much of science, in short-that has
since been the stage of most Western thought."

"This was only one of Pasteur's experiments.It is no easy matter to deal with so deeply ingrained and common-sense a
belief as that in spontaneous generation.One
can ask for nothing better in such a pass than a noisy and stubborn opponent,
and this Pasteur had in the naturalist Felix Pouchet, whose arguments before the
French Academy of Sciences drove Pasteur to more and more rigorous experiments.When he had finished, nothing remained of the belief in spontaneous
generation.

We tell this story to beginning students of biology as though it represents a
triumph of reason over mysticism.In
fact it is very nearly the opposite.The
reasonable view was to believe in spontaneous generation; the only alternative,
to believe in a single, primary act of supernatural creation.There is no third position.For
this reason many scientists a century ago chose to regard the belief in
spontaneous generation as a "philosophical necessity."It is a symptom of the philosophical poverty of our time that this
necessity is no longer appreciated.Most
modern biologists, having reviewed with satisfaction the downfall of the
spontaneous generation hypothesis, yet unwilling to accept the alternative
belief in special creation, are left with nothing.

I think a scientist has no choice but to approach the origin of life through a
hypothesis of spontaneous generation.What
the controversy reviewed above showed to be untenable is only the belief that
living organisms arrive spontaneously under present conditions.We have now to face a somewhat different problem: how organisms may have
arisen spontaneously under different conditions in some former period, granted
that they do so no longer."

"One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that
spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet here we are as a
result, I believe, of spontaneous generation."

"Time is the hero of the plot. The time with which we have to deal is of
the order of two billion years... Given so much time the 'impossible' becomes
possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has
only to wait: time itself performs miracles."

"Darwinian
theory is the creation myth of our culture. It's the officially sponsored,
government financed creation myth that the public is supposed to believe in, and
that creates the evolutionary scientists as the priesthood... So we have the
priesthood of naturalism, which has great cultural authority, and of course has
to protect its mystery that gives it that authority---that's why they're so
vicious towards critics."

"Naturalistic
evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No
gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate
foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5)
human free will is nonexistent."

Provine,
William B. [Professor of Biological Sciences, Cornell University], ",
"Evolution: Free will and punishment and meaning in life", Abstract of
Will Provine's 1998 Darwin Day Keynote Address.

"It
is no more heretical to say the Universe displays purpose, as Hoyle has done,
than to say that it is pointless, as Steven Weinberg has done. Both statements
are metaphysical and outside science. Yet it seems that scientists are permitted
by their own colleagues to say metaphysical things about lack of purpose and not
the reverse. This suggests to me that science, in allowing this metaphysical
notion, sees itself as religion and presumably as an atheistic religion (if you
can have such a thing)."

"Man
is the result of a purposeless and materialistic process that did not have him
in mind. He was not planned. He is a state of matter, a form of life, a sort of
animal, and a species of the Order Primates, akin nearly or remotely to all of
life and indeed to all that is material."

Simpson,
George Gaylord [late Professor of Vertebrate Paleontology, Museum of Comparative
Zoology, Harvard University, USA], "The Meaning of Evolution: A Study of
the History of Life and of its Significance for Man," [1949], Yale
University Press: New Haven CT, 1960, reprint, p.344.

"I
had motive for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed
that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons
for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not
concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics, he is also concerned
to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he
wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in
the way that they find most advantageous to themselves. … For myself, the
philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation,
sexual and political."

Aldous
Huxley: Ends and Means, pp. 270 ff.

Note: Some
have questioned my use of Huxley's quote here asking, "What does it have
to do with the theory of evolution?" The answer can be found in the
statements of Provine, Shallis, and Simpson just above. The theory of
evolution provides a means for the philosophical belief in a "purposeless
and materialistic process" of life. Some, like Huxley, find this
state of meaninglessness to be rather "liberating".

"Unfortunately
many scientists and non-scientists have made Evolution into a religion,
something to be defended against infidels. In my experience, many students of
biology - professors and textbook writers included - have been so carried away
with the arguments for Evolution that they neglect to question it. They preach
it ... College students, having gone through such a closed system of education,
themselves become teachers, entering high schools to continue the process, using
textbooks written by former classmates or professors. High standards of
scholarship and teaching break down. Propaganda and the pursuit of power replace
the pursuit knowledge. Education becomes a fraud."

"We
are told dogmatically that Evolution is an established fact; but we are never
told who has established it, and by what means. We are told, often enough, that
the doctrine is founded upon evidence, and that indeed this evidence 'is
henceforward above all verification, as well as being immune from any subsequent
contradiction by experience;' but we are left entirely in the dark on the
crucial question wherein, precisely, this evidence consists."

At
this point, it is necessary to reveal a little inside information about how
scientists work, something the textbooks don't usually tell you. The fact is
that scientists are not really as objective and dispassionate in their work as
they would like you to think. Most scientists first get their ideas about how
the world works not through rigorously logical processes but through hunches and
wild guesses. As individuals they often come to believe something to be true
long before they assemble the hard evidence that will convince somebody else
that it is. Motivated by faith in his own ideas and a desire for acceptance by
his peers, a scientist will labor for years knowing in his heart that his theory
is correct but devising experiment after experiment whose results he hopes will
support his position.

Boyce
Rensberger, How the World Works, William Morrow, NY, 1986, pp. 17–18.
Rensberger is an ardently anti-creationist science writer.

"Any
suppression which undermines and destroys that very foundation on which
scientific methodology and research was erected, evolutionist or otherwise,
cannot and must not be allowed to flourish ... It is a confrontation between
scientific objectivity and ingrained prejudice - between logic and emotion -
between fact and fiction ... In the final analysis, objective scientific logic
has to prevail - no matter what the final result is - no matter how many time-honoured
idols have to be discarded in the process ... After all, it is not the duty of
science to defend the theory of evolution and stick by it to the bitter end -no
matter what illogical and unsupported conclusions it offers ... If in the
process of impartial scientific logic, they find that creation by outside
intelligence is the solution to our quandary, then Lets cut the umbilical chord
that tied us down to Darwin for such a long time. It is choking us and holding
us back ... Every single concept advanced by the theory of evolution (and
amended thereafter) is imaginary as it is not supported by the scientifically
established probability concepts. Darwin was wrong... The theory of evolution
may be the worst mistake made in science."

I
L Cohen, Darwin Was Wrong - A Study in Probabilities PO Box 231, Greenvale, New
York 11548: New Research Publications, Inc. pp 6-8, 209-210, 214-215. I.L.Cohen,
Member of the New York Academy of Sciences and Officer of the Archaeological
Institute of America.

"In
fact, evolution became in a sense a scientific religion; almost all scientists
accepted it and many are prepared to 'bend' their observations to fit in with
it."

"I
think we need to go further than this and admit that the only acceptable
explanation is creation. I know this is an anathema to physicists, as indeed it
is to me, but we must not reject a theory that we do not like if the
experimental evidence supports it."

H.
S. Lipson; Prof of Physics, University of Manchester, A paper published by The
Institute of Physics, IOP Publishing Ltd., 1980

'We
have no acceptable theory of evolution at the present time. There is none; and I
cannot accept the theory that I teach to my students each year. Let me explain.
I teach the synthetic theory known as the neo-Darwinian one, for one reason
only; not because it's good, we know it is bad, but because there isn't any
other. Whilst waiting to find something better you are taught something which is
known to be inexact, which is a first approximation. . .'

Professor
Jerome Lejeune: From a French recording of internationally recognized
geneticist, Professor Jerome Lejeune, at a lecture given in Paris on March 17,
1985. Translated by Peter Wilders of Monaco.

"The
secrets of evolution are time and death. Time for the slow accumulations of
favorable mutations, and death to make room for new species."

"Time
is, in fact, the hero of the plot... given so much time the 'impossible' becomes
possible, the possible probable and the probable virtually certain. One has only
to wait: time itself performs miracles."

George
Wald, "The Origin of Life," Physics and Chemistry of Life, 1955, p.
12.

"It
was-and still is-very hard to arrive at this concept from inside biology. The
trouble lay in an unremitting cultural struggle which had developed from 1860
onward between biologists on the one hand and the supporters of old beliefs on
the other. The old believers said that rabbits had been created by God using
methods too wonderful for us to comprehend. The new believers said that rabbits
had been created from sludge, by methods too complex for us to calculate and by
methods likely enough involving improbable happenings. Improbable happenings
replaced miracles and sludge replaced God, with believers both old and new
seeking to cover up their ignorance in clouds of words, but different words. It
was over the words that passions raged, passions which continue to rumble on in
the modern world, passions that one can read about with hilarious satisfaction
in the columns of the weekly science magazine Nature and listen to in basso
profundo pronouncements from learned scientific societies."

"Charles
Robert Darwin stands among the giants of Western thought because he convinced a
majority of his peers that all of life shares a single, if complex, history. He
taught us that we can understand life's history in purely naturalistic terms,
without recourse to the supernatural or divine."

Eldredge,
Niles [Chairman and Curator of Invertebrates, American Museum of Natural
History], "Time Frames: The Rethinking of Darwinian Evolution and the
Theory of Punctuated Equilibria," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1985,
p.13.

"Here,
then, is Darwin's dangerous idea: the algorithmic level *is* the level that best
accounts for the speed of the antelope, the wing of the eagle, the shape of the
orchid, the diversity of species, and all the other occasions for wonder in the
world of nature. It is hard to believe that something as mindless and mechanical
as an algorithm could produce such wonderful things. No matter how impressive
the products of an algorithm, the underlying process always consists of nothing
but a set of individually mindless steps succeeding each other without the help
of any intelligent supervision; they are "automatic" by definition:
the workings of an automaton. They feed on each other, or on blind
chance-coin-flips, if you like-and on nothing else. ... Can it really be the
outcome of nothing but a cascade of algorithmic processes feeding on chance? And
if so, who designed that cascade? Nobody. It is itself the product of a blind,
algorithmic process. As Darwin himself put it, in a letter to the geologist
Charles Lyell shortly after publication of Origin, "I would give absolutely
nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions
at any one stage of descent...if I were convinced that I required such additions
to the theory of natural selection, I would reject it as rubbish..."

"Dr.
Gray goes further. He says, `The proposition that the things and events in
nature were not designed to be so, if logically carried out, is doubtless
tantamount to atheism.' Again, `To us, a fortuitous Cosmos is simply
inconceivable. The alternative is a designed Cosmos... If Mr. Darwin believes
that the events which he supposes to have occurred and the results we behold
around us were undirected and undesigned; or if the physicist believes that the
natural forces to which he refers phenomena are uncaused and undirected, no
argument is needed to show that such belief is atheistic.' We have thus arrived
at the answer to our question, What is Darwinism? It is Atheism. This does not
mean, as before said, that Mr. Darwin himself and all who adopt his views are
atheists; but it means that his theory is atheistic, that the exclusion of
design from nature is, as Dr. Gray says, tantamount to atheism."

"Thus,
a century ago, [it was] Darwinism against Christian orthodoxy. To-day the tables
are turned. The modified, but still characteristically Darwinian theory has
itself become an orthodoxy, preached by its adherents with religious fervour,
and doubted, they feel, only by a few muddlers imperfect in scientific
faith."

"The
more one studies palaeontology, the more certain one becomes that evolution is
based on faith alone; exactly the same sort of faith which it is necessary to
have when one encounters the great mysteries of religion."

"The
fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the
peculiar position of being a science founded on an unproved theory-is it then a
science or a faith? Belief in the theory of evolution is thus exactly parallel
to belief in special creation-both are concepts which believers know to be true
but neither, up to the present, has been capable of proof"

"It
is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS
virus, "mad cow" disease, and many others, but I think a case can be
made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox
but harder to eradicate."

"The
concept of organic evolution is very highly prized by biologists, for many of
whom it is an object of genuinely religious devotion, because they regard it as
a supreme integrative principle. This is probably the reason why severe
methodological criticism employed in other departments of biology has not yet
been brought to bear on evolutionary speculation."

"Reduced
to the initial and still crude form in which it is now emerging in the modern
world, the new religious spirit appears, as we have said (cf. I), as the
impassioned vision and anticipation of some super-mankind ... To believe and to
serve was not enough: we now find that it is becoming not only possible but
imperative literally to love evolution."

"But
in our own culture, where many people officially have no religion at all, and
those who have can chop and change, new faiths have much more scope and can
become more distinctive. They are hungrily seized on by people whose lives lack
meaning. When this happens, there arise at once, unofficially and spontaneously,
many elements which we think of as characteristically religious. We begin, for
instance, to find priesthoods, prophecies devotion, bigotry, exaltation, heresy-
hunting and sectarianism, ritual sacrifice, fanaticism, notions of sin,
absolution and salvation, and the confident promise of a heaven in the future.
... Marxism and evolutionism, the two great secular faiths of our day, display
all these religious-looking features. They have also, like the great religions
and unlike more casual local faiths, large-scale, ambitious systems of thought,
designed to articulate, defend and justify heir ideas - in short,
ideologies."

Evolutionists
purport to explain where we came from and how we developed into the complex
organisms that we are. Physicists, by and large, do not. So, the study of
evolution trespasses on the bailiwick of religion. And it has something else in
common with religion. It is almost as hard for scientists to demonstrate
evolution to the lay public as it would be for churchmen to prove
transubstantiation or the virginity of Mary."

Wills,
Christopher [Professor of Biology, University of California, San Diego],
"The Wisdom of the Genes: New Pathways in Evolution," Basic Books: New
York NY, 1989, p.9.

"Finally,
the evolutionary vision is enabling us to discern, however incompletely, the
lineaments of the new religion that we can be sure will arise to serve the needs
of the coming era. Just as stomachs are bodily organs concerned with digestion,
and involving the biochemical activity of special juices, so are religions
psychosocial organs concerned with the problems of human destiny, and involving
the emotion of sacredness and the sense of right and wrong. Religion of some
sort is probably necessary."

"The
doctrine of evolution by natural selection as Darwin formulated, and as his
followers still explain it, has a strong anti-religious flavour. This is due to
the fact that the intricate adaptations and co-ordinations we see in living
things naturally evoking the idea of finality and design and, therefore of an
intelligent providence, are explained, with what seems to be a rigorous
argument, as the result of chance. It may be said, and the most orthodox
theologians indeed hold, that God controls and guides even the events due to
chance - but this proposition the Darwinians emphatically reject, and it is
clear that in the Origin evolution is presented as an essentially undirected
process. For the majority of its readers, therefore, the Origin effectively
dissipated the evidence of providential control. It might be said that this was
their own fault. Nevertheless the failure of Darwin and his successors to
attempt an equitable assessment of the religious issues at stake indicates a
regrettable obtuseness and lack of responsibility."

"In
the evolutionary pattern of thought there is no longer either need or room for
the supernatural. The earth was not created: it evolved. So did all the animals
and plants that inhabit it, including our human selves, mind and soul as well as
brain and body. So did religion. "

"With
the failure of these many efforts [to explain the origin of life] science was
left in the somewhat embarrassing position of having to postulate theories of
living origins which it could not demonstrate. After having chided the
theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle, science found itself in the
unenviable position of having to create a mythology of its own: namely, the
assumption that what, after long effort, could not be proved to take place today
had, in truth, taken place in the primeval past."

"Discussions
of evolution came to an end primarily because it was obvious that no progress
was being made....When students of other sciences ask us what is now currently
believed about the origin of species we have no clear answer to give. Faith has
given place to agnosticism.... Biological science has returned to its rightful
place, investigation of the structure and properties of the concrete and visible
world. We cannot see how the differentiation into species came about. Variation
of many kinds, often considerable, we daily witness, but no origin of
species.... I have put before you very frankly the considerations which have
made us agnostic as to the actual mode and processes of evolution. When such
confessions are made the enemies of science see their chance.... Let us then
proclaim in precise and unmistakable language that our faith in evolution is
unshaken."

Bateson,
William [late founder of the science of Genetics, first Professor of Genetics,
Cambridge University, UK], "Evolutionary Faith and Modern Doubts." An
address delivered to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 28
December, 1921, Science, vol. LV, p.55., in More L.T., "The Dogma of
Evolution", Princeton University Press: Princeton NJ, 1925, p.28.

"As
far as Christianity was concerned, the advent of the theory of evolution and the
elimination of traditional teleological thinking was catastrophic. The
suggestion that life and man are the result of chance is incompatible with the
biblical assertion of their being the direct result of intelligent creative
activity. Despite the attempt by liberal theology to disguise the point, the
fact is that no biblically derived religion can really be compromised with the
fundamental assertion of Darwinian theory. Chance and design are antithetical
concepts, and the decline in religious belief can probably be attributed more to
the propagation and advocacy by the intellectual and scientific community of the
Darwinian version of evolution than to any other single factor."

"Evolutionary
man can no longer take refuge from his loneliness by creeping for shelter into
the arms of a divinized father-figure whom he has himself created, nor escape
from the responsibility of making decisions by sheltering under the umbrella of
Divine Authority, nor absolve himself from the hard task of meeting his present
problems and planning his future by relying on the will of an omniscient but
unfortunately inscrutable Providence. "

"I
suppose I had better mention the concept of a divine creator, but personally I
do not find that particular hypothesis useful and I am tempted to ask about the
cosmic accident that created Him (presumably before the 'big bangs' that started
the universe). And what did He do before He created the world and mankind?"

Ager,
Derek V. [Emeritus Professor of Geology, University College of Swansea, Wales],
"The New Catastrophism: The Importance of the Rare Event in Geological
History," Cambridge University Press: Cambridge UK, 1993, p.149.

"I
have always thought it curious that, while most scientists claim to eschew
religion, it actually dominates their thoughts more than it does the
clergy."

"It
is important to notice that it was not necessary for a scientist to renounce
religion in order to be a member in good standing of the new order. Simple
theism, such as Darwin possessed in 1859, interfered little with the practice of
science because it had no doctrines that prescribed beliefs about the world. The
more complex the theology, the greater was the potential for interference. The
problem, then, was not theism, but positive theological content. Scientists who
were theists could also be positivists. Those who were orthodox usually became
more liberal in their theological views as they drew closer to positive science.
The shift from one episteme to another required not the surrender of religion as
such, but rather its replacement by positivism as the epistemological standard
in science. And this eventually took God out of nature (if not out of reality)
as effectively as atheism. That religion could continue under such terms often
concealed from participants what had actually occurred. Nor were they the only
ones deceived. In the new episteme reality was always an inference. Men would
never be able to claim certainty for their beliefs while they continued within
its boundaries. Popularizers of the new science who spread a gospel of
metaphysical materialism based on science's supposed certain authority
appreciated the real significance of what had happened as little as did the
theologians who thought successful accommodation of a divinely revealed religion
to the new science was a simple matter of shedding a few antiquated
superstitions."

Gillespie,
Neal C. [professor of history at Georgia State University, USA], "Charles
Darwin and the Problem of Creation," University of Chicago Press: Chicago
IL, 1979, p.153.

"The
publication in 1859 of the Origin of Species signified the end of an automatic
acceptance of the God-given nature of human morality…Evolution does not give
us a complete set of ethical norms such as the Ten Commandments, yet an
understanding of evolution gives us a world view that can serve as a sound basis
for the development of an ethical system...."

"A record of pre-Cambrian animal life, it appears, simply does not
exist. Why this lamentable blank? Various theories have been proposed; none is
too satisfactory. It has been suggested, for example, that all the Pre-Cambrian
sediments were deposited on continental areas, and the absence of fossils in
them is due to the fact that all the older animals were seadwellers. But that
all these older sediments were continental is a theory which opposes, without
proof, everything we know of deposition in later times. Again, it is suggested
that the Pre-Cambrian seas were poor in calcium carbonate, necessary for the
production of preservable skeletons; but this is not supported by geochemical
evidence. Yet again, it is argued that even though conditions were amenable to
the formation of fossilizable skeletal parts, the various phyla only began to
use these possibilities at the dawn of the Cambrian. But it is, a priori, hard
to believe that the varied types present in the early Cambrian would all have,
so to speak, decided to put on armour simultaneously. And, once again, it has
been argued that the whole evolution of multicellular animals took place with
great rapidity in late Pre-Cambrian times, so that a relatively short gap in
rock deposition would account for the absence of any record of their rise.
Perhaps; but the known evolutionary rate in most groups from the Cambrian on is
a relatively leisurely one, and it is hard to convince oneself that a sudden
major burst of evolutionary advance would be so promptly followed by a marked
'slowdown'. All in all, there is no satisfactory answer to the Pre-Cambrian
riddle."

"From
1860 onward the more distant fossil record became a big issue, and over the next
two decades discoveries were made that at first seemed to give support to the
theory particularly the claimed discovery of a well-ordered sequence of fossil
horse' dating back about 45 million years. Successes like this continue to be
emphasized both to students and the public, but usually without the greater
failures being mentioned. Horses according to the theory should be connected to
other orders of mammals, which common mammalian stock should be connected to
reptiles, and so on backward through the record. Horses should thus be connected
to monkeys and apes, to whales and dolphins, rabbits, bears. ... But such
connections have not been found. Each mammalian order can be traced backward for
about 60 million years and then, with only one exception the orders vanish
without connections to anything at all. The exception is an order of small
insect-eating mammal that has been traced backward more than 65 million
years..."

"The
only illustration Darwin published in On the Origin of Species was a diagram
depicting his view of evolution: species descendant from a common ancestor;
gradual change of organisms over time; episodes of diversification and
extinction of species. Given the simplicity of Darwin's theory of evolution, it
was reasonable for paleontologists to believe that they should be able to
demonstrate with the hard evidence provided by fossils both the thread of life
and the gradual transformation of one species into another. Although
paleontologists have, and continue to claim to have, discovered sequences of
fossils that do indeed present a picture of gradual change over time, the truth
of the matter is that we are still in the dark about the origin of most major
groups of organisms. They appear in the fossil record as Athena did from the
head of Zeus-full-blown and raring to go, in contradiction to Darwin's depiction
of evolution as resulting from the gradual accumulation of countless
infinitesimally minute variations, which, in turn, demands that the fossil
record preserve an unbroken chain of transitional forms."

Schwartz,
Jeffrey H. [Professor of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, USA],
"Sudden Origins: Fossils, Genes, and the Emergence of Species," John
Wiley & Sons: New York NY, 1999, p.3.

"A
large number of well-trained scientists outside of evolutionary biology and
paleontology have unfortunately gotten the idea that the fossil record is far
more Darwinian than it is. This probably comes from the oversimplification
inevitable in secondary sources: low-level textbooks semipopular articles, and
so on. Also, there is probably some wishful thinking involved. In the years
after Darwin, his advocates hoped to find predictable progressions. In general.
these have not been found-yet the optimism has died hard and some pure fantasy
has crept into textbooks."

Raup,
David M. [Professor of Geology, University of Chicago], "Evolution and the
Fossil Record," Science, Vol. 213, No. 4505, 17 July 1981, p.289.

"In
spite of these examples, it remains true, as every paleontologist knows, that
most new species, genera, and families and that nearly all new categories above
the level of families appear in the record suddenly and are not led up to by
known, gradual, completely continuous transitional sequences.

Simpson,
George Gaylord [late Professor of Vertebrate Paleontology, Museum of Comparative
Zoology, Harvard University], "The Major Features of Evolution,"
[1953], Columbia University Press: New York, 1955, Second Printing, p.360.

"If
the creationists want to impress the Darwinian establishment, it will be no use
prating on about what the fossils say. No good Darwinian's belief in evolution
stands on the fossil evidence for gradual evolution, so nor will his belief fall
by it."

STEPHEN
GOULD, Harvard, "...one outstanding fact of the fossil record that many of
you may not be aware of; that since the so called Cambrian explosion...during
which essentially all the anatomical designs of modern multicellular life made
their first appearance in the fossil record, no new Phyla of animals have
entered the fossil record.", Speech at SMU, Oct.2, 1990

PRESTON
CLOUD & MARTIN F. GLAESSNER, "Ever since Darwin, the geologically
abrupt appearance and rapid diversification of early animal life have fascinated
biologist and students of Earth history alike....This interval, plus Early
Cambrian, was the time during which metazoan life diversified into nearly all of
the major phyla and most of the invertebrate classes and orders subsequently
known." SCIENCE, Aug.27, 1982

RICHARD
MONASTERSKY, Earth Science Ed., Science News, "The remarkably complex forms
of animals we see today suddenly appeared....This moment, right at the start of
the Earth's Cambrian Period...marks the evolutionary explosion that filled the
seas with the earth's first complex creatures....'This is Genesis material,'
gushed one researcher....demonstrates that the large animal phyla of today were
present already in the early Cambrian and that they were as distinct from each
other as they are today...a menagerie of clam cousins, sponges, segmented worms,
and other invertebrates that would seem vaguely familiar to any scuba
diver." Discover, p.40, 4/93

RICHARD
DAWKINS, Cambridge, "And we find many of them already in an advanced state
of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just
planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this
appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists....the only alternative
explanation of the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types in the
Cambrian era is divine creation...", THE BLIND WATCHMAKER, 1986, p229-230

H.S.
LADD, UCLA, "Most paleontologists today give little thought to
fossiliferous rocks older than the Cambrian, thus ignoring the most important
missing link of all. Indeed the missing Precambrian record cannot properly he
described as a link for it is in reality, about ninetenths of the chain of life:
the first ninetenths.", Geo. So. of Am. Mem. 1967, Vol.ll, p.7

PERCY
E. RAYMOND, Prof. of Paleontology, Harvard, "It is evidence that the oldest
Cambrian fauna is diversified and not so simple, perhaps, as the evolutionists
would hope to find it. Instead of being composed chiefly of protozoa's, it
contains no representatives of that phylum but numerous members of seven higher
groups are present, a fact which shows that the greater part of the major
differentiation of animals had already taken place in those ancient
times.", PREHISTORIC LIFE, 1967 p.23

Trees
and Fish in the Cambrian

JOHN
E. REPETSKI, U.S. Geological Survey, "The oldest land plants now known are
from the Early Cambrian... Approximately 60 Cambrian sporegenera are now on
record ....represent 6 different groups of vascular plants...", Evolution,
Vol. 13, June '59, p.264-275

SEPARATE
FOSSIL KINDS, Valentine (U. CA) & Erwin (MI St.), "If we were to expect
to find ancestors to or intermediates between higher taxa, it would be the rocks
of the late Precambrian to Ordovician times, when the bulk of the world's higher
animal taxa evolved. Yet traditional alliances are unknown or unconfirmed for
any of the phyla or classes appearing then.", Development As An
Evolutionary Process, p.84, 1987.

"TREES"
NOT FROM FOSSILS, S. J. GOULD, Harvard, "The evolutionary trees that adorn
our textbooks have dta only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is
inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of the fossils.", Nat.
His., V.86, p.13

STORY
TIME, COLIN PATTERSON, Senior Paleontologist, British Museum of Nat. History,
"You say I should at least 'show a photo of the fossil from which each type
or organism was derived.' I will lay it on the line-there is not one such fossil
for which one could make a watertight argument." "It is easy enough to
make up stories of how one form gave rise to another. ... But such stories are
not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test. ... I
don't think we shall ever have any access to any form of tree which we can call
factual." HARPER'S, Feb. 1984, p.56

ARBITRARY
ARRANGEMENT, R.H. DOTT, U. of Wis. & R.L. BATTEN, Columbia U., A.M.N.H.,
"We have arranged the groups in a traditional way with the 'simplest' forms
first, and progressively more complex groups following. This particular
arrangement is arbitrary and depends on what definition of 'complexity' you wish
to choose. ...things are alike because they are related, and the less they look
alike, the further removed they are from their common ancestor." EVOLUTION
OF THE EARTH, p.602

UNRELATED
LOOKALIKES, J.Z. YOUNG, Prof. of Anatomy, Oxford, "....similar features
repeatedly appear in distinct lines. ...Parallel evolution is so common that it
is almost a rule that detailed study of any group produces a confused taxonomy.
Investigators are unable to distinguish populations that are parallel new
developments from those truly descended from each other." LIFE OF THE
VERTEBRATES, p.779

INTERPRETATION
OF SIMILARITY, T.H. MORGAN Prof. Zoology, Columbia, Univ., "If, then, it
can be established beyond dispute that similarity or even identity of the same
character in different species is not always to be interpreted to mean that both
have arisen from a common ancestor, the whole argument from comparative anatomy
seems to tumble in ruins.", SCI. MO., l6;3;237, p.216

NONGENETIC
SIMILARITY, SIR GAVIN DEBEER, Prof. Embry., U. London, Director BMNH, "It
is now clear that the pride with which it was assumed that the inheritance of
homologous structures from a common ancestor explained homology was misplaced;
for such inheritance cannot be ascribed to identity of genes. The attempt to
find homologous genes has been given up as hopeless." Oxford Biology
Reader, p.16, HOMOLOGY AN UNSOLVED PROBLEM

EMBRYONIC
RECAPITULATION?, Ashley Montagu, "The theory of recapitulation was
destroyed in 1921 by Professor Walter Garstang in a famous paper. Since then no
respectable biologist has ever used the theory of recapitulation, because it was
utterly unsound, created by a Nazi-like preacher named Haeckel.",
Montagu-Gish Prinston Debate, 4/12/1980

Significant
Change Is Not Observed

BOTHERSOM
DISTRESS, STEPHEN J. GOULD, Harvard, Lecture at Hobart & William Smith
College, 14/2/1980. "Every paleontologist knows that most species don't
change. That's bothersome....brings terrible distress. ...They may get a little
bigger or bumpier but they remain the same species and that's not due to
imperfection and gaps but stasis. And yet this remarkable stasis has generally
been ignored as no data. If they don't change, its not evolution so you don't
talk about it."

DESIGNS,
S.J. GOULD, Harvard, "We can tell tales of improvement for some groups, but
in honest moments we must admit that the history of complex life is more a story
of multifarious variation about a set of basic designs than a saga of
accumulating excellence....I regard the failure to find a clear 'vector of
progress' in life's history as the most puzzling fact of the fossil record....we
have sought to impose a pattern that we hoped to find on a world that does not
really display it.", Natural His., 2/82, p.22

Required
Transitional Forms Missing

DARWIN'S
BIGGEST PROBLEM, "....innumerable transitional forms must have existed but
why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?
....why is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such
intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated
organic chain, and this perhaps is the greatest objection which can be urged
against my theory". ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES.

MORE
EMBARRASSING, DAVID M. RAUP, Univ. Chicago; Chicago Field Mus. of N.H.,
"The evidence we find in the geologic record is not nearly as compatible
with Darwinian natural selection as we would like it to be. Darwin was
completely aware of this. He was embarrassed by the fossil record because it
didn't look the way he predicted it would.... Well, we are now about 120 years
after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded.
We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn't
changed much. ...ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary
transition than we had in Darwin's time. By this I mean that some of the classic
cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the
horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as the result of
more detailed information." F.M.O.N.H.B., Vol.50, p.35

GOOD
RECORD-BAD PREDICTION, NILES ELIDRIDGE, Columbia Univ., American Museum of Nat.
Hist., "He [Darwin] prophesied that future generations of paleontologists
would fill in these gaps by diligent search. ... One hundred and twenty years of
paleontological research later, it has become abundantly clear that the fossil
record will not confirm this part of Darwin's predictions. Nor is the problem a
miserably poor record. The fossil record simply shows that this prediction was
wrong." The Myths of Human Evolution, p.45-46

Proposed
Links "Debunked"

STORY
TIME OVER, DEREK AGER, Univ. at Swansea, Wales, "It must be significant
that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student...have now been
'debunked.' Similarly, my own experience of more than twenty years looking for
evolutionary lineage's among the Mesozoic Brachiopoda has proved them equally
elusive.", PROC. GEOL. ASSO., Vol.87, p.132

"FOSSIL
BIRD SHAKES EVOLUTIONARY HYPOTHESIS", Nature, Vol. 322, 1986 p.677,
"Fossil remains claimed to be of two crow-sized birds 75 million years
older than Archaeopteryx have been found. ...a paleontologist at Texas Tech
University, who found the fossils, says they have advanced avian features.
...tends to confirm what many paleontologists have long suspected, that
Archaeopteryx is not on the direct line to modern birds."

REPTILE
TO BIRD W.E. SWINTON, "The origin of birds is largely a matter of
deduction. There is no fossil evidence of the stages through which the
remarkable change from reptile to bird was achieved." BIOLOGY &
COMPARATIVE PHYSIOLOGY OF BIRDS Vol. 1, p.1.

Systematic
Gaps

ORDERS,
CLASSES, & PHYLA, GEORGE GAYLORD SIMPSON, Harvard, "Gaps among known
species are sporadic and often small. Gaps among known orders, classes, and
phyla are systematic and almost always large.", EVOLUTION OF LIFE, p. 149

GENUINE
KNOWLEDGE, D.B. KITTS, University of Oklahoma, "Despite the bright promise
that paleontology provides a means of "seeing" evolution, it has
presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the most notorious of which
is the presence of 'gaps' in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate
forms between species and paleontology does not provide them... The 'fact that
discontinuities are almost always and systematically present at the origin of
really big categories' is an item of genuinely historical knowledge.",
Evolution, Vol. 28, p. 467

NOT
ONE ! D.S. WOODROFF, Univ. of CA, San Diego, "But fossil species remain
unchanged throughout most of their history and the record fails to contain a
single example of a significant transition." Science, Vol.208, 1980, p.716

EVIDENCE
A MATTER OF FAITH, A.C. SEWARD, Cambridge, PLANT LIFE THROUGH THE AGES, p.561,
"The theoretically primitive type eludes our grasp; our faith postulates
its existence but the type fails to materialize."

"WE
KNEW BETTER", NILES ELDREDGE, Columbia Univ., American Museum Of Natural
History, "And it has been the paleontologist my own breed who have been
most responsible for letting ideas dominate reality: .... We paleontologist have
said that the history of life supports that interpretation [gradual adaptive
change], all the while knowing that it does not.", TIME FRAMES, 1986, p.144

Punctuated
Equilibrium

"At
the higher level of evolutionary transition between basic morphological designs,
gradualism has always been in trouble, though it remains the
"official" position of most Western evolutionists. Smooth
intermediates between Bauplane are almost impossible to construct, even in
thought experiments; there is certainly no evidence for them in the fossil
record (curious mosaics like Archaeopteryx do not count). Even so convinced a
gradualist as G. G. Simpson (1944) invoked quantum evolution and inadaptive
phases to explain these transitions."

"...we
have proffered a collective tacit acceptance of the story of gradual adaptive
change, a story that strengthened and became even more entrenched as the
synthesis took hold. We paleontologists have said that the history of life
supports that interpretation, all the while really knowing that it does
not."

Eldredge,
Niles [Chairman and Curator of Invertebrates, American Museum of Natural
History], "Time Frames: The Rethinking of Darwinian Evolution and the
Theory of Punctuated Equilibria," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1985,
p.44.

"Darwin's
own bulldog, Huxley, as Eldredge reminds us yet again, warned him against his
insistent gradualism, but Darwin had good reason. His theory was largely aimed
at replacing creationism as an explanation of how living complexity could arise
out of simplicity. Complexity cannot spring up in a single stroke-of chance:
that would be like hitting upon the combination number that opens a bank vault.
But a whole series of tiny chance steps, if non-randomly selected, can build up
almost limitless complexity of adaptation. It is as though the vault's door were
to open another chink every time the number on the dials moved a little closer
to the winning number. Gradualness is of the essence. In the context of the
fight against creationism, gradualism is more or less synonymous with evolution
itself. If you throw out gradualness you throw out the very thing that makes
evolution more plausible than creation. Creation is a special case of saltation-the
saltus is the large jump from nothing to fully formed modern life. When you
think of what Darwin was fighting against, is it any wonder that he continually
returned to the theme of slow, gradual, step-by- step change?"

Dawkins,
Richard [Zoologist and Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, Oxford
University], "What was all the fuss about?" Review of Eldredge N.,
"Time Frames: The Rethinking of Darwinian Evolution and the Theory of
Punctuated Equilibria," Simon & Schuster, 1985, Nature, Vol. 316,
August 1985, pp.683-684.

Paleontology
once more, furnishes both the most direct evidence for the fact of evolution,
and the most imposing evidence against the conception of evolution as a
continuous, gradual progression of adaptive relationships. "Gaps in the
fossil record" were a serious stumbling block in Darwin's time, and despite
the discovery of many missing linked for example the striking completion of
horse family history, or the discovery of the bird ancestor Archaeopteryx, with
its reptilian features-they still persist. Moreover, they persist
systematically: over and over, with suddenness termed "explosive," a
bewildering variety of new types appear: this is true, notably, for example, of
the origin of the major mammalian types. Thus, as G.G. Simpson's calculations of
rates of evolution show, the bat's wing if evolved by "normal"
Mendelian mutation and selective pressure, would have had to begin developing
well before the origin of the earth!"

Grene,
Marjorie [Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of California, Davis],
"The Faith of Darwinism," Encounter, Vol. 74, November 1959, p.54.

"UNEMBARRASSED",
GOULD & ELDREDGE, "In fact, most published commentary on punctuated
equilibria has been favorable. We are especially pleased that several
paleontologists now state with pride and biological confidence a conclusion that
had previously been simply embarrassing; 'all these years of work and I haven t
found any evolution'. (R.A. REYMENT Quoted) "The occurrences of long
sequences within species are common in boreholes and it is possible to exploit
the statistical properties of such sequences in detailed biostratigraphy. It is
noteworthy that gradual, directed transitions from one species to another do not
seem to exist in borehole samples of microorganisms." (H.J. MACGILLAVRY
Quoted) "During my work as an oil paleontologist I had the opportunity to
study sections meeting these rigid requirements. As an ardent student of
evolution, moreover, I was continually on the watch for evidence of evolutionary
change. ...The great majority of species do not show any appreciable
evolutionary change at all. These species appear in the section (first
occurrence) without obvious ancestors in underlying beds, are stable once
established." Paleobiology, Vol.3, p.136

PUNCTUATED
EQUILIBRIUM, S.M. STANLEY, Johns Hopkins U. "The record now reveals that
species typically survive for a hundred thousand generations, or even a million
or more, without evolving very much. We seem forced to conclude that most
evolution takes place rapidly...a punctuational model of evolution...operated by
a natural mechanism whose major effects are wrought exactly where we are least
able to study them in small, localized, transitory populations. ...The point
here is that if the transition was typically rapid and the population small and
localized, fossil evidence of the event would never be found.", New
Evolutionary Timetable, 1981 pp.77, 110

PUNCTUATED
EQUILIBRIUM? COLIN PATTERSON, British Mus. of N. H., "Well, it seems to me
that they have accepted that the fossil record doesn't give them the support
they would value so they searched around to find another model and found one.
...When you haven't got the evidence, you make up a story that will fit the lack
of evidence. ", Quoted in: DARWIN'S ENIGMA, p. 100

INAPPLICABLE
TO "KINDS", Valentine (Univ. of CA) & Erwin (MI St. Univ),
"We conclude that...neither of the contending theories of evolutionary
change at the species level, phyletic gradualism or punctuated equilibrium, seem
applicable to the origin of new body plans.", Development As An
Evolutionary Process, p.96, 1987.

Implication
Of The Fossils

PALEONTOLOGY
DOES NOT PROVE EVOLUTION, D.B. KITTS, University of Oklahoma, "The claim is
made that paleontology provides a direct way to get at the major events of
organic history and that, furthermore, it provides a means of testing
evolutionary theories....the paleontologist can provide knowledge that cannot be
provided by biological principles alone. But he cannot provide us with
evolution.", Evolution, Vol.28, p.466

DON'T
USE THE FOSSILS, MARK RIDLEY, Oxford, "...a lot of people just do not know
what evidence the theory of evolution stands upon. They think that the main
evidence is the gradual descent of one species from another in the fossil
record. ...In any case, no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or
punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favor of the theory of
evolution as opposed to special creation." New Scientist, June, 1981, p.831

FOSSILS
INDICATE CREATION! E.J.H. CORNOR, Cambridge "Much evidence can be adduced
in favor of the Theory of Evolution from Biology, Biogeography, and
Paleontology, but I still think that to the unprejudiced the fossil record of
plants is in favor of special creation." CONTEMPORARY BOTANICAL THOUGHT,
p.61

'Biologists
would dearly like to know how modern apes, modern humans and the various
ancestral hominids have evolved from a common ancestor. Unfortunately, the
fossil record is somewhat incomplete as far as the hominids are concerned, and
it is all but blank for the apes. The best we can hope for is that more fossils
will be found over the next few years which will fill the present gaps in the
evidence.' The author goes on to say: 'David Pilbeam [a well-known expert in
human evolution] comments wryly, "If you brought in a smart scientist from
another discipline and showed him the meagre evidence we've got he'd surely say,
'forget it: there isn't enough to go on'."

"The
fossil record pertaining to man is still so sparsely known that those who insist
on positive declarations can do nothing more than jump from one hazardous
surmise to another and hope that the next dramatic discovery does not make them
utter fools ... Clearly some refuse to learn from this. As we have seen, there
are numerous scientists and popularizers today who have the temerity to tell us
that there is 'no doubt' how man originated: if only they had the
evidence..."

"Despite
the bright promise that palaeontology provides means of 'seeing' Evolution, it
has provided some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the most notorious of
which is the presence of 'gaps' in the fossil record. Evolution requires
intermediate forms between species and palaeontology does not provide
them."

"Feathers
are features unique to birds, and there are no known intermediate structures
between reptilian scales and feathers. Notwithstanding speculations on the
nature of the elongated scales found on such forms as Longisquama ... as being
featherlike structures, there is simply no demonstrable evidence that they in
fact are. They are very interesting, highly modified and elongated reptilian
scales, and are not incipient feathers."

The
following quote is an interesting attempt to explain the charge of circular
reasoning when using fossils to date rocks and rocks to date fossils:

"III.
STRATIGRAPHICAL GEOLOGY

The end and aim of
stratigraphical geology is the elucidation of the history of' the earth by a
study of the rocks composing it.It
is therefore sometimes called historical geology. ... Now stratigraphy is not a
mere academic science, concerned only with abstract history and dry bones. It is
of enormous practical value, for on it depend many problems in mining and
quarrying, engineering, water supply, oil-finding, and a number of other
subjects essential to the well-being of the world. ...

Let us now consider
briefly some of the principles and methods of stratigraphical geology, in a
systematic way. Two of the fundamental laws may be defined and explained as
follows.

First of all, there
is the principle that certain types of deposit are correlated with certain
physical and geographical conditions, and that this held in the past as in the
present.This is a restatement of
part of the Law of Uniformity . . . when we find among the older rocks certain
well-defined types of deposit like those now being formed under known
conditions, we are justified in drawing deductions as to the climatic and
geographical conditions of the time when the rocks in question were formed. ...

The second great law
is that organisms, regarded from the broadest biological standpoint, have
developed throughout the history of the world in a certain definite order of
progression from the less organized to the more organized types, from lower to
higher forms of life. This of course is a mere bald statement of the general
principle of evolution. From it follows the great generalization first stated by
William Smith, that the ages of strata can be determined by means of their
included fossils.

It cannot be denied
that from a strictly philosophical standpoint geologists are here arguing in a
circle. The succession of organisms has been determined by a study of their
remains embedded in the rocks, and the relative ages of the rocks are determined
by the remains of organisms that they contain.

Nevertheless the
arguments are perfectly conclusive. This apparent paradox will disappear in the
light of a little further consideration, when the necessary limitations have
been introduced. The true solution of the problem lies in the combination of the
two laws above stated, taking into account the actual spatial distribution of
the fossil remains, which is not haphazard, but controlled by definite laws. It
is possible to a very large extent to determine the order of superposition and
succession of the strata without any reference at all to their fossils. When the
fossils in their turn are correlated with this succession they are found to
occur in a certain definite order, and no other. Consequently, when the purely
physical evidence of superposition cannot be applied, as for example to the
strata of two widely separated regions, it is safe to take the fossils as a
guide; this follows from the fact that when both kinds of evidence are available
there is never any contradiction between them; consequently, in the limited
number of cases where only one line of evidence is available, it alone may be
taken as proof.

Taking all these facts into consideration, then, it has been found possible to
construct a history of the earth, at any rate from the times when conditions
became comparable with what they are now."

This
next quote is from the botanist Eldred Corner. Though a firm evolutionist
he was distinctly aware of the problems that tropical plant fossils posed for
the theory of evolution:

"The theory of evolution is not merely the theory of the origin of species,
but the only explanation of the fact that organisms can be classified into this
hierarchy of natural affinity. Much evidence can be adduced in favour of the
theory of evolution - from biology, bio-geography and palaeontology, but I still
think that, to the unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is in favour of
special creation. If, however, another explanation could be found for this
hierarchy of classification, it would be the knell of the theory of evolution.
Can you imagine how an orchid, a duckweed, and a palm have come from the same
ancestry, and have we any evidence for this assumption? The evolutionist must be
prepared with an answer, but I think that most would break down before an
inquisition.

Textbooks hoodwink. A series of more and more complicated plants is introduced -
the alga, the fungus, the bryophyte, and so on, and examples are added
eclectically in support of one or another theory - and that is held to be a
presentation of evolution. If the world of plants consisted only of these few
textbook types of standard botany, the idea of evolution might never have
dawned, and the backgrounds of these textbooks are the temperate countries
which, at best, are poor places to study world vegetation. The point, of course,
is that there are thousands and thousands of living plants, predominantly
tropical, which have never entered general botany, yet they are the bricks with
which the taxonomist has built his temple of evolution, and where else have we
to worship?"

There
have been an awful lot of stories, some more imaginative than others, about what
the nature of that history [of life] really is. The most famous example, still
on exhibit downstairs, is the exhibit on horse evolution prepared perhaps fifty
years ago. That has been presented as the literal truth in textbook after
textbook. Now I think that is lamentable, particularly when the people who
propose those kinds of stories may themselves be aware of the speculative nature
of some of that stuff.

(Colin
Patterson, a director of the Natural History Museum of England--Colin
Patterson, Harper's, February 1984, p.60)

Dr.
Niles Eldridge of the American Museum of Natural History admitted in an
interview that the Museum houses a display of alleged horse evolution, which is
misleading and should be replaced. It has been the model for many similar
displays across the country for much of this century.

(Bethel,
Tom, "The Taxonomic Case Against Darwin," Harper Magazine, Feb. 1985,
pp. 49-61. Niles Eldredge is quoted on page 60.Note that Dr Eldredge still believes in horse evolution, just not in the
smooth sequence of horse evolution that is presented in the museum)

On
December 9 archeologist and paleo-anthropologist Mary Leakey died at age 83.
Although Leakey was convinced that man had evolved from ape-like ancestors, she
was equally convinced that scientists will never be able to prove a particular
scenario of human evolution. Three months before her death, she said in an
interview: "All these trees of life with their branches of our ancestors,
that's a lot of nonsense."

(Associated
Press (AP) Dec. 10, 1996)

"Eleven
human skeletons, the earliest known human remains in the Western hemisphere,
have recently been dated by this new accelerator mass spectrometer technique.
All eleven were dated at about 5,000 radiocarbon years or less! If more of the
claimed evolutionary ancestors of man are tested and are also found to contain
carbon-14, a major scientific revolution will occur and thousands of textbooks
will become obsolete."

(Walter
T. Brown, In the Beginning (1989), p. 95)

Dr.
David Pilbeam an anthropologist at Harvard seems to have come to similar
conclusions.In a 1978 review of
Richard Leakey's book ORIGINS, he said that it was, "a clear statement of
our current consensus view of human evolution and remarkably up to date"
but he concluded with the following sobering thoughts:"My reservations concern not so much this book but the whole subject
and methodology of paleoanthropology.But
introductory books - or book reviews - are hardly the place to argue that
perhaps generations of students of human evolution, including myself, have been
flailing about in the dark: that our data base is too sparse, too slippery, for
it to be able to mold our theories. Rather the theories are more statements
about us and ideology than about the past.Paleoanthropology reveals more about how humans view themselves than it
does about how humans came about.But
that is heresy."

APES
UP FROM?, DONALD JOHANSON, "At any rate, modem gorillas, orangs and
chimpanzees spring out of nowhere, as it were. They are here today; they have no
yesterday...., LUCY, p.363

RECONSTRUCTIONS?
EARNST A. HOOTEN, Harvard, "To attempt to restore the soft parts is an even
more hazardous undertaking. The lips, the eyes, the ears, and the nasal tip,
leave no clues on the underlying bony parts. You can with equal facility model
on a Neanderthaloid skull the features of a chimpanzee or the lineaments of a
philosopher. These alleged restorations of ancient types of man have very little
if any scientific value and are likely only to mislead the public.... So put not
your trust in reconstructions.", UP FROM THE APE, p.332

RECONSTRUCTIONS?
W. HOWELLS, Harvard, "A great legend has grown up to plague both
paleontologists and anthropologists. It is that one of;men can take a tooth or a small and broken piece of bone, gaze at it, and
pass his hand over his forehead once or twice, and then take a sheet of paper
and draw a picture of what the whole animal looked like as it tramped the
Terriary terrain. If this were quite true, the anthropologists would make the
F.B.I. look like a troop of Boy Scouts.", MANKIND SO FAR, p. l38

THEORY
DOMINATED DATA, DAVID PILBEAM, YALE, "I am also aware of the fact that, at
least in my own subject of paleoanthropology, "theory" - heavily
influenced by implicit ideas almost always dominates "data". ....Ideas
that are totally unrelated to actual fossils have dominated theory building,
which in turn strongly influence the way fossils are interpreted." Quoted
in BONES OF CONTENTION p.127

PARANORMAL
ANTHROPOLOGY, LORD SOLLY ZUCKERMAN, "We then move right of the register
objective truth into those fields of presumed biological science, like
extrasensory perception or the interpretation of man's fossil history, where to
the faithful anything is possible and where the ardent believer is sometimes
able believe several contradictory things at the same time." BEYOND THE
IVORY TOWER, p.19

Similarities
do Not Necessarily Mean Common Ancestry

BASIS
OF "FAMILY TREE". ROGER LEWIN, Editor, Research News, Science,
"The key issue is the ability correctly to infer a genetic relationship
between two species on the basis of a similarity in appearance, at gross and
detailed levels of anatomy. Sometimes this approach....can be deceptive, partly
because similarity does not necessarily imply an identical genetic heritage: a
shark (which is a fish) and a porpoise (which is a mammal) look similar…,
BONES OF CONTENTION, 1987, p. 123

PROVEN
ANCESTRY? RICHARD C. LEWONTIN, Prof. of Zoology, Harvard, "Look, I'm a
person who says in this book [Human Diversity, 1982 that we don't know anything
about the ancestors of the human species. All the fossils which have been dug up
and are claimed to be ancestors we haven't the faintest idea whether they are
ancestors. ....All you've got is Homo sapiens there, you've got that fossil
there, you've got another fossil there...and it's up to you to draw the lines.
Because there are no lines.", Harpers, 2/84

Ramapithecus is a Discarded Ape

"APE
MAN" OUT, ROGER LEWIN, Ed., Research News, Science, "The dethroning of
Ramapithecus from putative first human in 1961 to extinct relative of the
orangutan in 1982 is one of the most fascinating, and bitter, sagas in the
search for human origins." BONES OF CONTENTION, 1987, p.86

"APES",
Robert B. Eckhardt, Penn. State Univ., "...there would appear to be little
evidence to suggest that several different hominoid species are represented
among the Old World dryopithecine fossils... (Ramapithecus, Oreopithecus,
Limnopithecus, Kenyapithecus). They themselves nevertheless seem to have been
apes morphologically, ecologically, and behaviorally.", Scientific
American, Vol.226, p.101

Australopithecus

SECOND
"APE MAN" OUT, ROGER LEWIN, Ed., Research News, Science, Richard and
his parents, Louis and Mary, have held to a view of human origins for nearly
half a century now that the line of true man, the line of Homo large brain, tool
making and so on has a separate ancestry that goes back millions and millions of
years. And the apeman, Australopithecus, has nothing to do with human
ancestry." BONES OF CONTENTION, 1987, p.18

LEAKEY
DEFECTION, "Dr. Leakey bases his repudiation of Darwin on the results of
his long search in East Africa for the remains of the original man. The
generally accepted post Darwin view is that man developed from the baboon 3 to 5
million years ago. But Leakey has found no evidence of a spurt in development at
that time.", Chicago American, 1/25, 1967

DISMISSED
APE, LORD SOLLY ZUCKERMAN, "His Lordship's scorn for the level of
competence he sees displayed by paleoanthropologists is legendary, exceeded only
by the force of his dismissal of the australopithecines as having anything at
all to do with human evolution. 'They are just bloody apes', he is reputed to
have observed on examining the australopithecine remains in South Africa..
Zuckerman had become extremely powerful in British science, being an adviser to
the government up to the highest level...,while at Oxford and then Birmingham
universities, he had vigorously pursued a metrical and statistical approach to
studying the anatomy of fossil hominids....it was on this basis that he
underpinned his lifelong rejection of the australopithecines as human
ancestors.", Roger Lewin, BONES OF CONTENTION, 1987, p.164, 165

DEFINITELY
AN APE, LORD SOLLY ZUCKERMAN, "The australopithecine skull is in fact so
overwhelmingly simian as opposed to human (figure 5) that the contrary
proposition could be equated to an assertion that black is white.", BEYOND
THE IVORY TOWER, p.78

UNHUMAN,
LIKE THE ORANGUTAN, CHARLES E. OXNARD, Dean of Graduate School, Prof. of Biology
& Anatomy, USC, "....conventional wisdom is that the australopithecine
fragments are generally rather similar to humans....the new studies point to
different conclusions. The new investigations suggest that the fossil fragments
are usually uniquely different from any living form: when they do have
similarities with living species, they are as often as not reminiscent of the
orangutan, ...these results imply that the various australopithecines are really
not all that much like humans. ....may well have been bipeds, .... but if so, it
was not in the human manner. They may also have been quite capable climbers as
much at home in the trees as on the ground..", The American Biology
Teacher, Vol.41, May 1979, pp.273-4

LIKE
PYGMY CHIMP, ADRIENNE L ZIHLMAN, U. C. Santa Cruz, "Zihlman compares the
pygmy chimpanzee to "Lucy," one of the oldest hominid fossils known
and finds the similarities striking. They are almost identical in body size, in
stature; and in brain size.... These commonalties, Zihlman argues indicate that
pygmy chimps use their limbs in much the same way Lucy did....", Science
News, Vol.123, Feb.5. 1983, p.89

AUSTRALOPITHECINES,
William Howells, Harvard, "...the pelvis was by no means modern, nor were
the feet: the toes were more curved than ours; the heel bones lacked our
stabilizing tubercles; and a couple of small ligaments that, in us, tighten the
arch from underneath, were apparently not present. The finger bones were curved
as they are in tree climbing apes." GETTING HERE, 1993, p.79

BELIEVE
IT, SEE IT, ROGER LEWIN, Editor of Research News, Science, "How is it that
trained men, the greatest experts of their day, could look at a set of modern
human bones the cranial fragments and "see" a clear simian signature
in them; and see in an apes jaw the unmistakable signs of humanity. The answers,
inevitably, have to do with the scientist's' expectations and there effects on
the interpretation of the data … It is, in fact, a common fantasy, promulgated
mostly by the scientific profession itself, that in the search for objective
truth, data dictate conclusions. If this were the case, then each scientist
faced with the same data would necessarily reach the same conclusion. But as
we've seen earlier and will see again and again, frequently this does not
happen. Data are just as often molded to fit preferred conclusions.", BONES
OF CONTENTION, pp.61, 68

FALSIFIED
CASTS, ALES HRDLICKA, Smithsonian (Re: Java Man)None of the published
illustrations or casts now in various institutions is accurate." Science,
Aug.17, 1923

EVIDENCE
MISSING, WILLIAM HOWELLS, Harvard, "Java Man went into Dubois' locker for a
time. But Peking Man seems to have gone into Davy Jones' locker, and for good.
He disappeared, one of the first casualties of the war in the Pacific, half a
million years after he had died the first time." MANKIND IN THE MAKING,
p.165

Neandertals
and Cromagnons are not "Missing Links" in Human Evolution

EVOLUTION
OR VARIATION? "....a Neanderthaler is a model of evolutionary refinement.
Put him in a Brooks Brothers suit and send him down to the supermarket for some
groceries and he might pass completely unnoticed. He might run a little shorter
than the clerk serving him but he would not necessarily be the shortest man in
the place. He might be heavier-Featured, squattier and more muscular than most,
but again he might be no more so than the porter handling the beer cases back in
the stock room." EVOLUTION, TimeLife Nature Library.

LARGER
BRAIN, WILLIAM HOWELLS, Harvard, "The Neanderthal brain was most positively
and definitely not smaller than our own; indeed, and this is a rather bitter
pill, it appears to have been perhaps a little larger.", MANKIND SO FAR,
p.165

MODERN
CAME FIRST, O. BARYOSEF, Peabody Museum, Harvard, B. VANDERMEERCH, Univ.
Bordeaux, "Modern Homo sapiens preceded Neanderthals at Mt. Carmel.
...modern looking H. sapiens had lived in one of the caves some 50,000 to
100,000 years ago, much earlier than such people had been thought to exist
anywhere. ...The results have shaken the traditional evolutionary scenario,
producing more questions than answers." Scientific American, p.94, April
1993

Modern
Human Morphology "Older" than Proposed Ancestors

RUINED
FAMILY TREE, "Either we toss out this skull [1470] or we toss out our
theories of early man," asserts anthropologist Richard Leakey of this 2.8
million year old fossil, witch he has tentatively identified as belonging to our
own genus. "It simply fits no previous models of human beginnings."
The author, son of famed anthropologist Louis S. B. Leakey, believes that the
skull's surprisingly large braincase "leaves in ruins the notion that all
early fossils can be arranged in an orderly sequence of evolutionary
change.", National Geographic, June 1973, p.819

HUMAN
BRAIN, Dean Falk, St. U. of N.Y. at Albany, "...KNMER 1805 Homo habilis
should not be attributed to Homo... the shape of the endocast from KNMER (basal
view) is similar to that from an African pongid, where as the endocast of KNMER
1470 is shaped like that of a modern human." Science, 221, (9/9/83) p.1073

HUMAN
BRAIN "The foremost American experts on human brain evolution Dean Falk of
the State University of New York at Albany and Ralph Holloway of Columbia
University usually disagree, but even they agree that Broca's area is present in
a skull from East Turkana known as 1470.Philip
Tobias...renowned brain expert from South Africa concurs." Anthro Quest:
The Leakey's Foundation News. No.43 (Spring 91) p.13

NOT
ERECTUS, "According to paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall of the American
Museum of Natural History in New York the African skulls...assigned to erectus
often lack many of the specialized traits that were originally used to define
that species in Asia, including the long low cranial structure thick skull
bones, and robustly built faces. In his view, the African group deserves to be
placed in a separate species..." Discover, 9/94, p.88

"OLD"
MODERN MEN, Louis Leakey, 'In 1933 I published on a small fragment of jaw we
call Homo kanamensis, and I said categorically this is not a nearman or ape,
this is a true member of the genus Homo. There were stone tools with it too. The
age was somewhere around 2.5 to 3 million years. It was promptly put on the
shelf by my colleagues, except for two of them. The rest said it must be placed
in a 'suspense account.' Now, 36 years later, we have proved I was right."
Quoted in BONES OF CONTENTION, p.156

'THE
OLDEST MAN', "[African Footprints] ....they belonged to the genus Homo (or
true man), rather than to manapes (like Australopithecus, who was once a thought
to be the forerunner of man but is now regarded as a possible evolutionary dead
end). ....they were 3.35 million to 3.75 million years old. ....they would, in
Mary Leakeys words, be people 'not unlike ourselves,'...." Time, Nov. 10,
1975, p.93

TOO
HUMAN TOO OLD, Russel H. Tuttle, Professor of Anthropology, University of
Chicago, Affiliate Scientist, Primate Research Center, Emory University,
"In sum, the 3.5millionyearold footprint trails at Laetoli sight G resemble
those of habitually unshod modem humans…If the G footprints were not known to
be so old, we would readily conclude that they were made by a member of our
genus...in any case we should shelve the loose assumption that the Laetoli
footprints were made by Lucy's kind..." Natural History, 3/90, p.64.

MODERN
& TALL, RICHARD LEAKEY, ....the boy from Turkana was surprisingly large
compared with modern boys his age; he could well have grown to six feet. ....he
would probably go unnoticed in a crowd today. This find combines with previous
discoveries of Homo erectus to contradict a long held idea that humans have
grown larger over the millennia.", National Geographic, p.629, Nov., 1985

Modern Human
Morphology Around Before Lucy

CHARLES
E. OXNARD Dean, Grad. School, Prof. Bio. and Anat., USC, "...earlier finds,
for instance, at Kanapoi...existed at least at the same time as, and probably
even earlier than, the original gracile australopithecines... almost
indistinguishable in shape from that of modern humans at four and a half million
years..." American Biology Teacher, Vol.41, 5/1979, p.274.

HENRY
M. MCHENRY, U. of C., Davis, "The results show that the Kanapoi specimen,
which is 4 to 4.5 million years old, is indistinguishable from modern Homo
sapiens..." Science Vol.190, p.~28.

WILLIAM
HOWELLS, Harvard, "...with a date of about 4.4 million, [KP 271] could not
be distinguished from Homo sapiens morphologically or by multivariate analysis
by Patterson and myself in 1967 (or by much more searching analysis by others
since then). We suggested that it might represent Australopithecus because at
that time allocation to Homo seemed preposterous, although it would be the
correct one without the time element.", HOMO ERECTUS, 1981, p.79-80.

EVE
KICKED OUT, STEPHEN J. GOULD, "...'mitochondral Eve' hypothesis of modern
human origins in Africa, suffered a blow in 1993, when the discovery of an
important technical fallacy in the computer program used to generate and assess
evolutionary trees debunked the supposed evidence for an African
source...disproving the original claim.", Natural History, 2/94, p.21

The
Geologic Column

VON
ENGELN & CASTER, "If a pile were to be made by using the greatest
thickness of sedimentary beds of each geological age, it would be at least 100
miles high. ....lt is, of course, impossible to have even a considerable
fraction of this great pile available at any one place. The Grand Canyon of the
Colorado, for example, is only one mile deep." GEOLOGY, p.417

BUILT
BY CORRELATION, L. DON LEET (Harvard) & SHELDON JUDSON (Princeton),
"Because we cannot find sedimentary rocks representing all of earth time
neatly in one convenient area, we must piece together the rock sequence from
locality to locality. This process of tying one rock sequence in one place to
another in some other place is known as correlation, from the Latin for
'together' plus 'relate'". PHYSICAL GEOLOGY, P.181

"Use
of the lead/uranium ratio, however, soon demonstrated its age to be more than
two thousand million years,.... To some thoughtful stratigraphers this amazing
discovery presented a dilemma, for if the known stratified rocks have been
accumulating throughout this vast span of time the average rate of deposition
must have been extremely slow, yet there is very good evidence that individual
beds accumulated rapidly. Thus Schuchert ....found that if a geologic column
were built up by superposing the thickest known part of each of the geologic
systems in North America, from Cambrian to the present, the composite record
would be about 259,000 feet thick. If we combine his results with the latest
estimates of time based on radioactive minerals, we get the figures in Table 5,
in which the last column indicates the estimated average rate of deposition.
Internal evidence in the strata, however, belies these estimates. In the Coal
Measures of Nova Scotia, for example, the stumps and trunks of many trees are
preserved standing upright as they grew, clearly having been buried before they
had time to fall or rot away. Here sediment certainly accumulated to a depth of
many feet within a few years. ln other formations where articulated skeletons of
large animals are preserved, the sediment must have covered them within a few
days at the most. Abundant fossil shells likewise indicate rapid burial, for if
shells are long exposed on the sea floor they suffer abrasion or corrosion and
are overgrown by sessile organisms or perforated by boring animals. At the rate
of deposition postulated by Schuchert, 1000 years, more or less, would have been
required to bury a shell 5 inches in diameter. With very local exceptions fossil
shells show no evidence of such long exposure." PRINCIPLES OF STRATIGRAPHY,
p. 128.

NILES
ELDREDGE, Columbia Univ. "And this poses something of a problem,: If we
date the rocks by their fossils, how can we then turn around and talk about
patterns of evolutionary change through time in the fossil record?" TIME
FRAMES, 1985, p.52

TOM
KEMP, Oxford, "A circular argument arises: Interpret the fossil record in
the terms of a particular theory of evolution, inspect the interpretation, and
note that it confirms the theory. Well, it would, wouldn't it?" New
Scientist, Vol.108, Dec.5, 1985, p. 67

J.
E. O'ROURKE, "The rocks do date the fossils, but the fossils date the rocks
more accurately. Stratigraphy cannot avoid this kind of reasoning if it insists
on using only temporal concepts, because circularity is inherent in the
derivation of time scales.", American Journal of Science, Vol. 276, p.51

D.
B. KITTS, Univ. of Oklahoma, "But the danger of circularity is still
present.... The temporal ordering of biological events beyond the local section
may critically involve paleontological correlation....for almost all
contemporary paleontologist it rest upon the acceptance of the evolutionary
hypothesis.", Evolution Vol. 28, p.466

DAVID
M. RAUP, U. of Chicago; Field Museum of N.H., "The charge that the
construction of the geologic scale involves circularity has a certain amount of
validity...Thus, the procedure is far from ideal and the geologic ranges are
constantly being revised (usually extended) as new occurrences are found.",
FMONH Bulletin, Vol. 54, Mar. 1983, p.21

Alternate
Explanations

TIME
RELATIONS?, DUNBAR & ROGERS "....though facies and faunal relations are
recorded in the rocks and fossils, and their determination can be reasonable
exact and objective, time relations are not so recorded, and their determination
remains an ideal, toward which we strive, but which we can only approximate....
It follows that correlation, being....essentially an interpretation, is the
result of personal judgment, and that it can never be wholly
objective,....", PRINCIPLES OF STRATIGRAPHY, p.272

FOSSIL
PROGRESSION?, DAVID M. RAUP, Chicago Field Museum, Prof. of Geology, Univ. of
Chicago, "A large number of well-trained scientists outside of evolutionary
biology and paleontology have unfortunately gotten the idea that the fossil
record is far more Darwinian than it is. This probably comes from the
oversimplification inevitable in secondary sources: low-level textbooks,
semipopular articles, and so on. Also, there is probably some wishful thinking
involved. In the years after Darwin, his advocates hoped to find predictable
progressions. In general, these have not been found.Yet the optimism has died hard, and some pure fantasy has crept into
textbooks." New Scientist, Vol. 90, p.832, 1981

Geologic
Implication Of Greenhouse Effect:

CLIMATE
OF THE PAST, DOTT AND BATTEN, Evolution of the Earth, "Devonian land plants
are similar the world over, suggesting that climate was rather uniform. Wide
distribution of richly fossiliferous middle Paleozoic marine carbonate rocks,
and especially the great latitudinal spread of fossil reefs, suggest subtropical
conditions....lt. has long been felt that the average climate of the earth
through time has been milder and more homogeneous than it is today. If so the
present certainly is not a very good key to the past in terms of climate!"
p.298

DIFFICULT
FOR WHOM? VON ENGELN & CASTER, "The warm, equable climate,
characteristic of the entire Cretaceous, prevailed also over most of the world
throughout the Jurassic with, possibly, localized exceptions. This universal
tropicallity is difficult to explain." GEOLOGY, p.491

Revolution To Catastrophism Among Contemporary Geologist

RECORD
IS CATASTROPHIC, DAVID M. RAUP, Chicago Field Museum, Univ. of Chicago, "A
great deal has changed, however, and contemporary geologists and paleontologists
now generally accept catastrophe as a 'way of life' although they may avoid the
word catastrophe... The periods of relative quiet contribute only a small part
of the record. The days are almost gone when a geologist looks at such a
sequence, measures its thickness, estimates the total amount of elapsed time,
and then divides one by the other to compute the rate of deposition in
centimeters per thousand years. The nineteenth century idea of uniformitarianism
and gradualism still exist in popular treatments of geology, in some museum
exhibits, and in lower level textbooks....one can hardly blame the creationists
for having the idea that the conventional wisdom in geology is still a
noncatastrophic one." Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin (Vol.54,
March 1983), p.2 1

"THE
RULE", ROBERT H. DOTT, Presidential Address To Society of Economic
Paleontologists & Mineralogists, "I hope I have convinced you that the
sedimentary record is largely a record of episodic events rather than being
uniformly continuous. My message is that episodicity is the rule, not the
exception. .we need to shed those lingering subconscious constraints of old
uniformitarian thinking." Geotimes, Nov. 1982, p.16

CATACLYSMIC
BURIAL, JOHN R. HORNER, "There was
no question anymore. We had one huge bed of maiasaur bones--and nothing but
maiasaur bones--stretching a mile and a quarter east to west and a quarter-mile
north to south. Judging from the concentration of bones in various pits, there
were up to 30 million fossil fragments in that area. At a conservative estimate,
we had discovered the tomb of 10,000 dinosaurs. . .

What could such a deposit represent? None of
the bones we found had been chewed by predators. But most of the bones were in
poor condition. They were either broken or damaged some other way, some broken
in half, some apparently sheared lengthwise. They were all oriented from east to
west, which was the long dimension of the deposit. Smaller bones, like hand and
toe bones, skull elements, small ribs and neural arches of vertebrae, were rare
in most of the deposit. At the easternmost edge of the deposit, however, these
bones were the most common elements. All the bones were from individuals ranging
from 9 feet long to 23 feet long. There wasn't one baby in the whole deposit.
The bone bed was, without question, an extraordinary puzzle. First there was the
terrible condition of the bones. As early as the first Brandvold site, we
thought that a mud flow might have done this. However, on reflection, the
condition of the bones argued for something other than animals just being buried
alive, even in a vicious mud flow from a breached lake. As I mentioned before,
it didn't make sense that even the most powerful flow of mud could break bones
lengthwise when they were still padded in flesh and tied together by ligaments.
Nor did it make sense that a herd of living animals buried in mud would end up
with all their skeletons disarticulated, their bones almost all pointing in one
direction and most of the small bones at one edge of the deposit. It seemed that
there had to be a twofold event, the dinosaurs dying in one incident and the
bones being swept away in another. . .

Over time, of course, the stench disappeared and the killing field turned into a
boneyard. Perhaps beetles were there to clean the bones. The bones lay in the
ash and dirt. Some fossilization occurred, as well as some acid destruction of
the bones. . .

Then there was a flood. This was no ordinary spring flood from one of the
streams in the area, but a catastrophic inundation. Perhaps, as John Lorenz
thought, a lake was breached, turning the field of death--now covered with
partially fossilized, partially dissolved skeletons, unconnected by ligaments,
flesh and skin--into a huge slurry as the water floated the bones, mud and
volcanic ash into churning fossil soup. The bones of the maiasaurs would have
been carried to a new location and left there as the floodwaters or mud settled.
Had this occurred, the bones would have acquired their uniform orientation, and
the smallest pieces, weighing the least, would have been carried the farthest.
Finally the ash, being light, would have risen to the top in this slurry, as it
settled, just as the bones sank to the bottom. And over this vast collection of
buried, fossilized dinosaur bones would have been left what we now find--a thin
but unmistakable layer of volcanic ash. That's our best explanation. It seems to
make the most sense, and on the basis of it we believe that this was a living,
breathing group of dinosaurs destroyed in one catastrophic moment." DIGGING
DINOSAURS, 1988, p.131

EDWIN
D. MCKEE, "The chief significance of ripple lamination in the geologic
record is that it is an indicator of environments involving large and rapid sand
accumulation… areas where addition of new sand normally is at a slow rate have
little chance of developing into superimposed ripple lamination…In contrast,
areas in which sand accumulates periodically but rapidly, as in river flood
plains were sand laden waters of strong floods suddenly lose velocity are very
favorable for building up ripple laminated deposits." Primary Sedimentary
Structures and Their Hydrodynamic Interpretation, Society of Economic
Paleontologists and Mineralogists, p.107.

ADOLF
SClLACHER, Geoiogisches Inst., Univ. Frankfurt, "This proves instantaneous
deposition of the individual beds, as postulated by the turbidity-current
theory....the sandy layers of the Flysch did not accumulate gradually but were
cast instantaneously by turbidity currents each bed in its entire thickness, in
a matter of hours or less." Journal of Geology, Vol. 70, p. 227.

Alan
V. Jopling, Dept. of Geology, Harvard, "it is reasonable to postulate a
very rapid rate of deposition; that is a single lamina would probably be
deposited in a period of seconds or minutes rather than in a period of hours.
...there is factual evidence from both field observation and experiment that
laminae composed of bed material are commonly deposited by current action within
a period of seconds or minutes." Some Deductions on the Temporal
Significance of Laminae, Journal of Sedimentary Petrology, Vol. 36, No. 4,
pp.880-887.

"Hanging
from a ceiling beam in the 40yearold building's basement are several rows of
formations not usually seen so close to ground level. Stalactites. Yep,
stalactites more than 100 of the squiggly, slippery rock formations that
thousands of people pay to see in places named Carlsbad and Mammoth....They are
natural cave ornaments, pure and simple....Deputy Chief Ray Hawkins has been
parking in the basement of the building at Harwood and Main streets since the
1960s and can't remember a time when the mineralsickles weren't hanging
around." Dallas Morning News, 4/4/1994, p. 13A

Randomness
of Life and DNA

"...
Life cannot have had a random beginning ... The trouble is that there are about
two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is
only one part in 10 to the power of 40,000, an outrageously small probability
that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup. If
one is not prejudiced either by social beliefs or by a scientific training into
the conviction that life originated on the Earth, this simple calculation wipes
the idea entirely out of court ..."

(Fred
Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space)

"The
likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number
with 40,000 noughts after it ... It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole
theory of evolution ... if the beginnings of life were not random, they must
therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence."

"...An
intelligible communication via radio signal from some distant galaxy would be
widely hailed as evidence of an intelligent source. Why then doesn't the message
sequence on the DNA molecule also constitute prima facie evidence for an
intelligent source? After all, DNA information is not just analogous to a
message sequence such as Morse code, it is such a message sequence."

"Evolution
lacks a scientifically acceptable explanation of the source of the precisely
planned codes within cells without which there can be no specific proteins and
hence, no life."

(David
A Kaufman, Ph.D., University of Florida, Gainsesville)

"Is
it really credible that random processes could have constructed a reality, the
smallest element of which - a functional protein or gene - is complex beyond ...
anything produced by the intelligence of man?"

"There
is no agreement on the extent to which metabolism could develop independently of
a genetic material. In my opinion, there is no basis in known chemistry for the
belief that long sequences of reactions can organize spontaneously -- and every
reason to believe that they cannot. The problem of achieving sufficient
specificity, whether in aqueous solution or on the surface of a mineral, is so
severe that the chance of closing a cycle of reactions as complex as the reverse
citric acid cycle, for example, is negligible."

Biologists aren't entirely satisfied with the intrinsic subjectivity of
classification, and have hoped that molecular biology would yield a more
quantitative approach. It was hoped that comparisons of the nucleotides of DNA
or RNA sequences would yield quantitative numbers that could be used to classify
organisms with a high degree of accuracy. According to an article in the January
1998 issue of Science:

Animal
relationships derived from these new molecular data sometimes are very different
from those implied by older, classical evaluations of morphology. Reconciling
these differences is a central challenge for evolutionary biologists at present.
Growing evidence suggests that phylogenies of animal phyla constructed by the
analysis of 18S rRNA sequences may not be as accurate as originally thought. (Maley
& Marshall, "The Coming of Age of Molecular Systematics,” Science,
23 January 1998, page 505)

The article then discusses a figure that shows that mollusks are more closely
related to deuterostomes than arthropods when the creatures being compared are a
scallop (a mollosk), a sea urchin (a deuterostome), and a brine shrimp (an
arthropod). That isn't too surprising. Intuitively, a scallop seems more like a
sea urchin than a shrimp, and the 82% correlation between the scallop and sea
urchin shown on their diagram isn't surprising.

But when a tarantula is used as the representative of the arthropod, there is a
92% correlation between the scallop and the tarantula. It doesn't seem
reasonable that a scallop should be more closely related to a harry,
land-dwelling spider than to a sea urchin. This is troubling to the authors of
the Science article, which leads them
to remark:

The
critical question is whether current models of 18S rRNA evolution are
sufficiently accurate … current models of DNA substitution usually fit the
data poorly. (Ibid)

Mutations

"One
of the ironies of the history of biology is that Darwin did not really explain
the origin of new species in The Origin of Species, because he didn't know how
to define species. The Origin was in fact concerned mostly with how a single
species might change in time, not how one species might proliferate into
many."

Futuyma,
Douglas J. [Professor of Evolutionary Biology, State University of New York,
Stony Brook], "Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution," Pantheon:
New York NY, 1982, p.152.

"Micromutations
do occur, but the theory that these alone can account for evolutionary change is
either falsified, or else it is an unfalsifiable, hence metaphysical theory. I
suppose that nobody will deny that it is a great misfortune if an entire branch
of science becomes addicted to a false theory. But this is what has happened in
biology: ... I believe that one day the Darwinian myth will be ranked the
greatest deceit in the history of science. When this happens many people will
pose the question: How did this ever happen?"

"Generation
after generation, through countless cell divisions, the genetic heritage of
living things is scrupulously preserved in DNA ... All of life depends on the
accurate transmission of information. As genetic messages are passed through
generations of dividing cells, even small mistakes can be life-threatening ...
if mistakes were as rare as one in a million, 3000 mistakes would be made during
each duplication of the human genome. Since the genome replicates about a
million billion times in the course of building a human being from a single
fertilized egg, it is unlikely that the human organism could tolerate such a
high rate of error. In fact, the actual rate of mistakes is more like one in 10
billion."

(Miroslav
Radman and Robert Wagner, The High Fidelity of DNA Duplication... Scientific
America. Vol. 299, No 2 (August 1988, pp 40-44. Quote is from page 24))

"As
a final comment, one can only marvel at the intricacy in a simple bacterium, of
the total motor and sensory system which has been the subject of this review and
remark that our concept of evolution by selective advantage must surely be an
oversimplification. What advantage could derive, for example, from a "preflagellum"
(meaning a subset of its components), and yet what is the probability of
"simultaneous" development of the organelle at a level where it
becomes advantageous?"

"[Natural
selection] may have a stabilizing effect, but it does not promote speciation. It
is not a creative force as many people have suggested." Daniel Brooks, as
quoted by Roger Lewin, "A Downward Slope to Greater Diversity,"
Science, Vol. 217, 24 September 1982, p. 1240.

"The
genetic variants required for resistance to the most diverse kinds of pesticides
were apparently present in every one of the populations exposed to these
man-made compounds." Francisco J. Ayala, "The Mechanisms of
Evolution," Scientific American, Vol. 239, September 1978, p. 65.

"To
propose and argue that mutations even in tandem with 'natural selection' are the
root-causes for 6,000,000 viable, enormously complex species, is to mock logic,
deny the weight of evidence, and reject the fundamentals of mathematical
probability."

Cohen,
I.L. (1984) Darwin Was Wrong: A Study in Probabilities , New York: New Research
Publications, Inc., p. 81

"In
all the thousands of fly-breeding experiments carried out all over the world for
more than fifty years, a distinct new species has never been seen to emerge ...
or even a new enzyme."

MICHEL
DELSOL PROF. OF BIOLOGY, UNIV. OF LYONS, "If mutation were a variation of
value to the species, then the evolution of drosophila should have proceeded
with extreme rapidity. Yet the facts entirely contradict the validity of this
theoretical deduction; for we have seen that the Drosophila type has been known
since the beginning of the Tertiary period, that is for about fifty million
years, and it has not been modified in any way during that time."
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE LIFE SCIENCES Volume II, p. 34.

Colin
Patterson, British Museum of Natural History, "No one has ever produced a
species by mechanisms of natural selection. No one has ever gotten near it and
most of the current argument in neo-Darwinism is about this question.",
CLADISTICS, BBC, March 4 1982.

"It
may be time to rethink Our thoughts about the mechanisms for antibiotic -
resistance patterns...The anaerobic bacteria, from the bowels of three members
of an lt',45 Arctic expedition have survive 140 yrs and are showing resistance
patterns to modern antibiotics. Current theories suggest that antibiotic
resistance is linked to long-term exposure to antibiotics. Needless to say,
antibiotics were not developed until long after these 19th century bacteria and
their hosts have been buried in arctic permafrost.'' Medical Tribune, 12/29/88,
p.23

S.
M. STANLEY, Johns Hopkins Univ. "Once established, an average species of
animal or plant will not change enough to be regarded as a new species, even
after surviving for something like a hundred thousand or a million, or even ten
million generations… Something tends to prevent the wholesale restructuring of
a species, once it has become well established on earth." Johns Hopkins
Magazine, p.6, June, 1982.

STEPHEN
T. GOIJLD, Harvard, "A mutation doesn't produce major new raw material. You
don't make a new species by mutating the species. ...That's a common idea people
have; that evolution is due to random mutations. A mutation is NOT the cause of
evolutionary change." Lecture at Hobart and William Smith College,
14/2/1980

STEPHEN
T. GOUI.D, HARVARD, We can tell tales of improvement for some groups, but in
honest moments we must admit that the history of complex life is more a story of
multifarious variation about a set of basic designs than a saga of accumulating
excellence. NATURAL HISTORY, 2/82, P. 22,23

STEPHEN.
T GOULD Harvard, "I well remember how the synthetic theory beguiled me with
its unifying power when I was a graduate student in the mid -1960's. Since then
I have been watching it slowly unravel as a universal description of
evolution…I have been reluctant to admit it - since beguiling is often forever
- but if Mayr's characterization of the synthetic theory is accurate, then that
theory as a general proposition, is effectively dead, despite its persistence as
textbook orthodoxy." Paleobiology Vol. 6 1980 p. 120.

THEODOSIUS
DOBZHANSKY, "....one can say that mutations are owing to incorrect copying,
to occasional mistakes in the generally so remarkably accurate process of
replication.... You may, if you wish, compare mutations to accidental
misspellings or misprints which even the most experienced copyist may from time
to time....harmfulness of most mutants is just what could be reasonably
expected. ....an accident, a random change, in any delicate mechanism can hardly
be expected to improve it. Poking a stick into the machinery of one's watch or
into one's radio set can hardly be expected to make it work better.",
HEREDITY AND THE NATURE OF MAN, p.126

JEAN
ROSTAND, "No, decidedly, I cannot make myself think that these 'slips' of
heredity have been able, even with the cooperation of natural selection, even
with the advantage of the immense periods of time in which evolution works on
life, to build the entire world, with its structural prodigality and
refinements, its astounding 'adaptations,...I cannot persuade myself to think
that the eye, the ear, the human brain have been formed in this way; " The
Orion Book of Evolution, p. 17

No
Such Thing as a “Simple” Life Form

J.
MONOD, "....we have no idea what the structure of a primitive cell might
have been. The simplest living system known to us, the bacterial
cell....in....its overall chemical plan is the same as that of all other living
beings. It employs the same genetic code and the same mechanism of translation
as do, for example, human cells. Thus the simplest cells available to us for
study have nothing 'primitive' about them....no vestiges of truly primitive
structures are discernible." CHANCE AND NECESSITY, p. 134. College text
used by students just a generation ago is under serious attack. New insights
into planetary formation have made it increasingly doubtful that clouds of
methane and ammonia ever dominated the atmosphere of the primitive earth....If
scientists have, by and large, tossed out the old ideas, they have not yet
reached a consensus on the new. Time, 10/11/1993

CARL
SAGAN Cornell, "The information content of a simple cell has been estimated
as around 10 to the 12th power bits, comparable to about a hundred million pages
of the Encyclopedia Britannicas.", Life, Vol.10 p.894. RICIHARD DAWKINS,
Oxford, "Some species of the unjustly called 'primitive' amoebas have as
much information in their DNA as 1000 Encyclopedia Britannicas.", The Blind
Watchmaker, 1986, p.116.

MICHAEL
DENTON Molecular Biologist (Agnostic), "To grasp the reality of life as it
has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand
million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant
airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we
would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive
design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the
portholes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream
of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we
would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering
complexity.... Is it really credible that random processes could have
constructed a reality, the smallest element of which functional protein or gene
- is complex beyond our own creative capacities, a reality which is the very
antithesis of chance, which excels in every sense anything produced by the
intelligence of man?", EVOLUTION, A THEORY IN CRISIS, 1985, pp. 327-8, 342.

Creatures
Bigger and Better in the Past

VON
ENGELN & CASTER, "Also that mammalian life was richer in kinds, of
larger sizes, and had a more abundant expression in Pliocene than in later
times.", GEOLOGY, p.19

"Leakey...had
been scouring the globe since 1931. Over the years he has unearthed the bones of
an ancient pig as big as a rhino, a six foot tall sheep a twelve foot tall bird
and the flat - topped skull of the erect 'Nutcracker man'."; TIME MAGAZINE,
March 10, 1961

CLIFFORD
SIMAK, TRILOBITE, DINOSAUR AND MAN, p.158 . "In general all the
Pennsylvanian insects were larger than the ones we know today."

Archaeology

'I
know of no finding in archaeology that’s properly confirmed which is in
opposition to the Scriptures. The Bible is the most accurate history textbook
the world has ever seen.’

Dr
Clifford Wilson, formerly director of the Australian Institute of Archaeology,
being interviewed by radio by the Institute for Creation Research (ICR radio
transcript No. 0279–1004).

General
Statements

"Molecular
evolution is not based on scientific authority. There is no publication in the
scientific literature in prestigious journals, specialty journals, or books that
describes how molecular evolution of any real, complex, biochemical system
either did occur or even might have occurred. There are assertions that such
evolution occurred, but absolutely none are supported by pertinent experiments
or calculations."

(Behe,
Michael J. (1996) Darwin's Black Box, The Free Press, p. 185)

Recently
two prominent British scientists, Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe,
admittedly were 'driven by logic' to conclude that there must be a Creator.
"It is quite a shock," said Wickramasinghe, a professor of applied
mathematics and astronomy. The Sri Lankan-born astronomer explained: "From
my earliest training as a scientist I was very strongly brainwashed to believe
that science cannot be consistent with any kind of deliberate creation. That
notion has had to be very painfully shed. I am quite uncomfortable in the
situation, the state of mind I now find myself in. But there is no logical way
out of it. Once we see . . . that the probability of life, originating at random
is so utterly minuscule as to make it absurd, it becomes sensible to think that
the favorable properties of physics on which life depends are in every respect
'deliberate,' " or created. Professor Wickramasinghe also said: "I now
find myself driven to this position by logic. There is no other way in which we
can understand the precise ordering of the chemicals of life except to invoke
the creations on a cosmic scale. . . .We
were hoping as scientists that there would be a way round our conclusion, but
there isn't."

CARL
SAGAN, Cornell, "Unacceptable high mutation rates will, of course, occur at
much lower u.v. doses, and even if we imagine primitive organisms having much
less stringent requirements on the fidelity of replication than do contemporary
organisms, we must require very substantial u.v. attenuation for the early
evolution of life to have occurred..", Journal of Theoretical Biology,
Vol.39, p.197

FRANCIS
CRICK, "An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now,
could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to
be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have
been satisfied to get it going." LIFE IT SELF, 1981, p. 88.

ILYA
PRIGOGIN (Nobel Laureate) "Unfortunately this principle cannot explain the
formation of biological structures. The probability that at ordinary
temperatures a macroscopic number of molecules is assembled to give rise to the
highly ordered structures and to the coordinated functions characterizing living
organisms is vanishingly small. The idea of spontaneous genesis of life in its
present form is therefore highly improbable, even on the scale of billions of
years during which prebiotic evolution occurred." Physics Today, Vol.25
p.28.

ISAAC
ASIMOV, "As far as we know, all changes are in the direction of increasing
entropy, of increasing disorder, of increasing randomness, of running down. Yet
the universe was once in a position from which it could run down for trillions
of years. How did it get into that position?" Science Digest, May 1973,
pp.76-77

H.J.
LIPSON, Physics, U. of Manchester, "I think however that we should go
further than this and admit that the only accepted explanation is creation. I
know that is anathema to physicists, as it is to me, but we must not reject a
theory that we do not like if the experimental evidence supports it.",
Physics Bulletin,Vol.31, 1980, p.138

G.J.
VAN WYLEN, RICHARD SONNTAG, "...we see the second law of thermodynamics as
a description of the prior and continuing work of a creator, who also holds the
answer to our future destiny and that of the universe." FUNDAMENTALS OF
CLASSICAL, THERMODYNAMICS, 1985, p.232.